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As clues mount, mystery deepens around Miami school slaying
More articles on this topic: Michael HernandezPALMETTO BAY — The garden stone along the walk to 14-year-old Michael Hernandez’s front door is decorated with pastel-painted birdhouses and two eggs in a nest surrounded by the words, “Seeds of blessings. Love at home.”
Contrast the eighth grader’s seemingly devoted home to the charge that he painstakingly documented plans to slash the throat of his best friend in a school restroom stall and followed through with it as the bell rang for morning classes.
Clues have mounted in the three months since Jaime Gough’s black clothing hid the blood spilling from his gaping neck wounds, but the mystery of why Hernandez would do it seems to deepen.
Prosecution records show he demonstrated a fascination with violence and a slight boy’s preoccupation with bodybuilding against a backdrop of religiosity.
“The reason it’s horrifying and riveting is anyone can relate to this situation in saying, ‘That could have been my kid,”’ said Leonard Haber, a Miami psychologist who has worked for defense attorneys and prosecutors in dozens of murder cases.
Hernandez faces a mandatory life sentence if convicted as an adult of premeditated murder. Records show he outlined his intentions in a handwritten, eight-item action plan ending with the phrase, “Thank God for success first.”
The how-to list came from a personal journal that included a hit list naming 14-year-old Jaime, another classmate who used to be the victim’s best friend and Hernandez’s sister at college. At one point, Hernandez wanted to try an incapacitation technique on his other targeted friend, but the 13-year-old boy refused, investigators say.
Forty-four pages of jottings on perfection, bodybuilding, prayer, violent movies and video games, and Internet downloads on mass killers and bomb making have been disclosed by prosecutors as part of the pretrial process. A series of police interviews have also been released. Hernandez had collections of 11 Bibles, eight throwing stars and six knives.
Halfway down a one-page list, Hernandez instructs himself: “You will be a serial killer and mass murderer. Stay alone. Never forget God ever. Have a cult and plan a mass kidnapping for new world.”
And there’s a same-day, videotaped confession without a motive.
All this came as a shock to Hernandez’s parents, a consignment store owner and hospital therapist. Manny and Kathy Hernandez had been paying college bills and saving for retirement on the middle-class edge of an affluent Miami suburb when Jaime was murdered Feb. 3.
In the parents’ only interview, Manny Hernandez told The Miami Herald, “That was not our boy who did that.” Jaime’s parents have notified school officials that they intend to sue the district for damages.
Famed forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, whose firm looked for lessons in the Columbine school massacre five years ago, insists it is a parent’s duty to search the room of a child who collects weapons, uses drugs or has been stopped by police.
“They would have found his hit list and his writings and could have prevented it,” Dietz said. “The journal seems to indicate that he knew he was contemplating taking a human life and that he knew it was illegal.”
School violence has become numbingly commonplace. The National School Safety Center has counted 348 deaths, both murders and suicides, at and near schools since 1992, an average of 29 a year. The Secret Service concluded two years ago that there was no profile for school killers and few threats directed at targets.
But there was evidence of planning, and almost every attacker behaved in a way that alarmed at least one adult.
No one has reported any warning signs from Hernandez who was smart enough to get into a magnet school after attending a Baptist academy nine blocks from home. Victim and killer attended the top-rated, 1,850-student Southwood Middle School, a two-story edifice decorated with a smiling yellow star with a top hat and cane, denoting its magnet program for the arts.
Jaime, who liked baseball and played the violin and flute, spent his final moments following Hernandez’s scheme to get his victim into the wide stall with the ruse of showing him something. There was always his gravity knife, where the blade drops and locks in place at the touch of a button.
On his birthday Feb. 2, Hernandez wanted to first kill his other friend, identified in court papers by the initials ADM, and then Jaime while wearing a red Tommy Hilfiger jacket and blue baseball cap from his pre-planned murder kit.
Hernandez wore the jacket and hat but couldn’t get ADM to enter the stall first. ADM promised to return to the restroom the next morning when Jaime was killed but forgot. The school was locked down after two boys screamed there was “a dead boy” in the bathroom. Hernandez sat in class making up excuses for the blood on his mouth, clothes and shoes. His backpack held his knife, latex gloves, jacket and cap.
In the realm of drugs, Hernandez’s parents say he began taking the bodybuilding supplement creatine, which is untested on children, last December and finished about three-quarters of a 1.1-pound container.
For obvious reasons, the defense is being pushed in the direction of insanity. With all the evidence of planning, even the argument for an impulsive outburst is gone.
“That’s all that they’re left with: I did it, but it wasn’t really me. It was somebody else that took over my mind and body,” Haber said. “But very few of those defenses fly, maybe 1 or 2 percent.”
Defense psychologist John Spencer is coordinating examinations of Hernandez, who is held in isolation in an adult jail.
“It’s to be seen what kind of mind Michael has,” Spencer said. “There’s no question in my mind that he has a thought disorder, but digging it up, being able to name the beast is going to be a difficult task for any diagnostician because there’s so many other trappings of normalcy.”
Seen in both speech and writing, thought disorder is observed in everything from attention deficit disorders to schizophrenia. The only thing that got Hernandez in trouble at school was talking too much.
Defense attorney Richard Rosenbaum believes Hernandez will stand trial but no date has been set. “I haven’t heard any offers and I’m not really keen on pleading a kid to life,” he said.
Bruce Fleisher, a Miami criminal defense attorney with three current insanity cases, sees the defendant’s defense as a battle of the experts.
If doctors agree on insanity, “the state system says they’re going to keep you forever unless and until there’s a change in circumstance, until you are competent and you are no longer a danger to yourself or others,” Fleisher said.
If a jury takes over, “Even if they believe that the defendant was insane at the time, they have the feeling that he might get out in a couple of years after being in an institution and do it again.”
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