If you live on the EastCoast you no doubt have heard about the horrible multiple rapes and murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters Haley 17 and Michaela 11, after a home invasion. The brutal crimes culminating with the house being torched was survived by Dr. William Petit who was brutally beaten with a baseball bat.
The first of the two charged, Steven Hayes, 47, has been found guilty and sentenced to death
Next ob trial will be Joshua Komisarjevsky, 29, who has been dubbed the "mastermind" of the grisly crime that first forced Mrs. Petit to withdraw $15,000 dollars and ended with the death of her and her two daughters.
Police say Hayes raped and strangled Jennifer, and prosecutors say Komisarjevsky raped Michaela, 11.
Joshua Komisarjevsky was born on Aug. 10, 1980, immediately given up for adoption, and within days went home with Jude and Ben Komisarjevsky. The couple are devout Christians who by all accounts live modestly, but come from a storied and wealthy family. His adoptive family called the crime he is charged with "a monstrous, deranged act, beyond compehension."
As a child, Joshua spent time at the 65-acre estate of his adoptive step-grandfather, John Chamberlain, a writer who published in conservative opinion magazines, in Cheshire.
He says he committed his first crime when he was 12 years old, stealing a car. He says he did it by taking advantage of Cheshire's unlocked doors, plucking the keys from inside an unlocked house, in order to get home in time to avoid being caught violating his curfew.
Among the several houses on the property, young Joshua lived with his parents in a pre-Revolutionary War home they referred to as The Homestead. This home, still in use, is less than two miles from the Petit home at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive.
Most burglaries occur in the daytime. Criminals generally don't want trouble and prefer to rob homes during the day when no one's home. But according to his own confessions to police and a journalist, Joshua Komisarjevsky enjoyed the rush of breaking into people's homes at night while they slept.
Komisarjevky sought out dangerous situations and seemed to get an almost erotic thrill from his trangressions. He describes breaking into other people's homes at night, waiting, standing still, and listening to sleeping strangers slowly breathing in their beds. He would wear latex gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints and, at least on one occasion, he told police, he used night-vision goggles to see in the dark.
Komisarjevky's predilection for the night may have begun when he was young but over the years developed into a criminal modus operandi. When retired Cheshire police officer Bill Glass first heard about the early morning home invasion on July 23, 2007, no one had to tell him who was involved. "I knew it was Komisarjevsky," he said.
"Robbing a house is better than any drug I've ever tried," the young thief once told a friend. Komisarjevsky has called burglary "a form of extreme sport."
4 comments:
Typical sociopath. Would you have put this on your blog had he not been adopted? You have stated elsewhere that the subject of adopted killers was trivial since there are so few. Yet here we are again.
I think it needs to be mentioned that Joshua Komisarjevsky was raped by one of the foster child collectibles the Komisarjevskys took in during his teen years. From The New York Times, Aug 7, 2007:
". . . parents, Benedict Komisarjevsky, who ran a construction company, and Jude Motyka, who home-schooled Josh and his sister, Naomi. The family had also taken in foster children, and when Mr. Komisarjevsky was 14, he was raped by one of them, his mother told an investigator for the state’s Department of Children and Families.
That was the year Mr. Komisarjevsky started breaking into homes."
Rape is a rage-inducing event, especially for male teens. The child collecting certainly didn't help, though--we agree there. And he sounds as though he had some conscience-based problems that might have been organic, as they are increasingly thought to be.
Did I mention this because he is adopted. Yes. this is a blog about all aspects of adoption and family preservation. Also, because it is in my radar as the case is on my TV newscast nightly.
Would I mention it if an adoptee was elected President or won the noble prize? Also yes.
I see all news effecting adoption and adoptees worthy of being posted here.
Did I draw any conclusions? No. I put it out there for discussion - or not. I "reported" it the same as the news sources where I obtained the information. And I am aware that some adopters object tot he news ever reporting that a person is adopted - expect of course when they are being praised for adopting.
I do agree that his adopters "collecting" kids (though I don't know how many or if it would be of a volume to warrant such a label) was very much a contributing factor. Joshua reports it as THE turning point in his life being sexually abused by that foster child in his home.
One still has to wonder about the measure of *nurture* he received in his adoptive home. Of course, we will never know the truth of what this murderer, when an innocent child, what he had to endure behind closed doors in his adoptive home. And you can bet your last dollar the adoptive parents will never own up to any possible, less than, nurturing they provided to their adopted son, when they brought him home as a baby. Sad, sad, sad all the way around...especially the people who so terribly suffered at his hands, when he was an adult.
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