In the Headlines
Teen-age Killer Joshua Jenkins (June Update)
Teen-age Killer Joshua Jenkins
May 23, 1997By David B. Chamberlain, Editor
In Vista, CA lawyers for both sides wrapped up four weeks of testimony today in the case of teen-age killer Joshua Jenkins. On February 2 and 3, 1996, the sixteen year old boy used a hammer, knife, and ax to kill his parents, his grandparents, and his ten year old sister. After cleaning the instruments, taking a shower and changing into clean clothes, the boy set the condominium on fire and fled.
Joshua Jenkins was adopted and always wanted to know about his birth parents, but was never told. His adopting parents said they had a letter from his birth mother but refused to show it to him. This was just one source of continuing anger. For years, he had been aggressive with his parents, teachers, and others. In the summer of 1995 he was arrested after a fight with his father. Subsequently, his parents placed him in a school for troubled youths in Los Angeles. He said he thought his parents had abandoned him.
The trial cost over $40,000 in fees for just one of the four psychiatrists who argued over the boy's sanity at the time of the killing. Three defense psychiatrists claimed he was schizophrenic and was acting out a delusion of "saving" his family from a dangerous world. The prosecution presented a noted forensic psychiatrist who disputed the diagnosis but acknowledged that the boy certainly suffered from mental illness. All agreed that the boy suffered from chronic depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, and severe learning disability.
Although it was not a matter of interest to the court, the boy's spread of illnesses and disabilities point directly to the prenatal period when his brain was constructed. His equipment for living was shaped in the womb of a mother who did not plan to keep him. This circumstance does not automatically mean there was preconceptual thoughtlessness and injury, negligence during construction of the embryo, or nutritional poverty throughout pregnancy, but all these possibilities should be checked out by any parent seriously considering adoption of an unwanted child.
Although schizophrenia has long defied explanation in psychiatry, and its typical blossoming in adolescence obscures its connection to events before birth, the latest understandings of this ubiquitous mental illness are coming from hi-tech studies which reveal structural deficiencies in schizophrenic brains. The schizophrenic brain does not work as it should to separate fantasy from reality or rationality from emotion. Impulsivity typically overwhelms patience and judgment. All these deficits in normal brain power are consistently discovered in clinical assessments of incarcerated criminals, especially those found guilty of heinous crimes of violence.
Prisons are full of persons who cannot give normal attention, do not learn from experience, cannot control their extreme moods, do not discern between right and wrong, who act out their paranoid suspicions, and self-medicate chronic depression with street drugs and alcohol. The real foundation of their problematic lives is a poorly built brain constructed in the bellies of their mothers. If what follows after birth is also done poorly, we have the makings of the familiar trail of sorrows that ends in rage and death. Can we really believe that longer prison terms will dissuade these persons from committing a crime?