Insanity defense trial: Victim describes seeing her damaged face for first time

COLLIER COUNTY — Crying and whimpering, a woman told jurors Tuesday how a brutal beating in her Golden Gate apartment nearly four years ago ended in her being in a coma for 20 days, changed her life and left her with permanent scars.

“When I went to the bathroom that first time, I did not know what happened to me when I saw my face that first time,” Norma Mendoza, 41, testified through a Spanish interpreter.

She burst into sobs, paused and dabbed her eyes before describing for jurors the injuries caused by Halden Lee Casey, 29, who had moved in with her temporarily about a day before the May 18, 2006, attack.

Mendoza began sobbing, bowed her head and held a tissue to her eyes. One eye was smaller than the other, her fractured nose was crooked, and her eyebrow was divided by a scar that stretched up her forehead and into her scalp.

Casey, who is charged with attempted murder, isn’t denying he beat, kicked and stomped on Mendoza until he crushed her skull, then slit her wrist. Or that he tried to murder her.

He’s using an insanity defense and is expected to testify today, a day after jurors heard his “bizarre,” rambling taped confession, which may have bolstered his insanity defense more than it helped the prosecution’s case.

He’s been in the jail since his arrest that day, but spent several months in a state psychiatric facility after doctors found him incompetent to stand trial.

Assistant state attorneys Lisa Mead and Mara Marzano rested their case after 15 witnesses Tuesday, the second day of the trial before Collier Circuit Judge Fred Hardt.

Today, defense attorney Landon Miller will continue the defense case, which began Tuesday, when Dr. Paul Kling, a clinical psychologist, testified Casey was insane at the time of the attack.

It will be a battle of medical experts who will dissect Casey’s history of mental illness, commitments to a mental hospital, suicide attempts, and his confession, which his own attorney and state witnesses called bizarre.

Whether jurors believe he was insane will mean the difference between life in prison or being committed to a psychiatric facility.

Mendoza testified Casey attacked her after she made him a meal and he began asking questions, demanding she write down her feelings. It was shortly before 4:30 a.m. and it scared her, so she tried to flee from him.

“I cannot write with my right hand, I cannot write any more,” she testified, holding up her scarred wrist. “I was reborn, I had to learn how to eat, how to comb my hair. I used to brush my hair to this side, but now I have to brush it to the other side because of my scar.”

“It changed my life,” testified Mendoza, who suffered brain damage and remembered Casey pulling her hair and throwing her in the bathroom, but nothing else until after she awakened from a coma.

She later stood before jurors, holding up her scarred wrist, then lifting her hair to show the long scar.

As she testified, Casey didn’t look at her, but sat at the defense table in a white shirt, tie and gray pants intently scribbling in a notebook. At one point, he clasped his hands and sat back, drank a cup of water, then bowed his head in his clasped hands, as if in prayer.

Mendoza’s testimony came after Collier Sheriff’s deputies and a paramedic described a bloody scene at the 41st Terrace Southwest apartment. It was shortly after Mendoza’s landlady, Petra Moreno, called 911, a minute before Casey’s 4:30 a.m. call.

Lt. Michael Cossick, a paramedic, testified the apartment smelled of blood and he found Mendoza naked on the bathroom floor, a knife on her back, her face so swollen it was unrecognizable. The slit to her wrist was so deep his finger “went inside her arm.” He described blood everywhere, on walls, the ceiling, counters -- and Mendoza was covered in it.

“It was gruesome,” Cossick testified, calling the crime scene so bloody that a firefighter passed out after helping him carry Mendoza to an ambulance.

Jurors saw photos of Mendoza and the crime scene. They heard deputies testify how Casey asked to listen to his favorite radio station while sitting in the patrol car, then questioned why the ambulance ignored him because he was “a victim” and was worried he’d get a disease from Mendoza’s blood.

Jurors heard his 911 call, how he admitted murdering a woman, that she was breathing, but wasn’t going to make it, and he was harmless and ready to go to jail. They also heard from Deputy Susan Currie, a jail officer, who testified that after being booked into the jail and placed in restraints because he was “agitated,” Casey whistled, sang, “Norma, do you want to come out and play?” talked to himself and shouted, Are you still breathing? You’re a nasty (expletive. Die slowly (expletive).”

Currie testified he also made a gurgling sound, then asked her if she knew what it was. “He said it’s the sound of breathing when your face is smashed in,” Currie testified.

But it was the testimony of Investigator Michael Haburjak, who questioned Casey and obtained his confession that was so unusual. Jurors heard the 36-minute taped confession, as Casey’s mother, Sonja Wilcox, Mendoza, victim advocate Betty Ardaya, prosecutors, defense attorneys, Hardt’s wife, and County Judge Mike Carr packed one side of the courtroom, listening in shock.

It began with Casey leaving his job as a hotel desk manager after midnight, watching a movie with a female friend, getting distracted, leaving and riding his motorbike. He looked at the sky, which spoke to him.

Casey, who had been thrown out of his family home, said he had nowhere to go, but knew he had to ride to Mendoza’s apartment because she was thinking of him, she’d feed him and he could sleep.

After eating salmon and green beans, he said he was upset after revealing his feelings to her and she didn’t open up.

“And I felt that the only way that I could fulfill (my world) was to kill her and to kill myself, so that there was a story that represented the fact that I wasn’t ... going to go against my world.”

“I wasn’t going to go against what I believed in,” he continued. “That even I had to take her life and my life ... that’s all I could do. Because I didn’t wanna be trapped and put into a position where I was stuck and couldn’t fulfill, you know, my ... my, uh, destiny.”

That morning, he assured Mendoza he was a “bueno chico,” that he wasn’t going to hurt her, and handed her a notebook, urging her to write her feelings. But “she darted for the door.”

“And I grabbed her in fear that she would leave and tell a story that wasn’t true,” he said, adding that she started to yell, so he asked her to go to the bathroom so no one would hear. “Cause what that scene looked like, right then, there was a lot of unanswered questions. OK? There was a lot of room for her to tell a story that wasn’t true. And I don’t wanna be caught in a lie.”

(Detectives had testified the apartment was in disarray.)

Knowing it was her word against his, he told the detective he wanted her to tell the truth about herself or he would kill her. When she screamed and wouldn’t go to the bathroom, he said he knew it was only “a matter of time” before someone came and she’d be able to say whatever she wanted.

“So ... I hit her with my fist in the face continuously ... until I felt her face cave in. And then I felt that I couldn’t cave her face in any more so I started to stomp on her head. ... And I felt like her neck was breaking, but she was still breathing. But I kept just stomping on her head and I wanted her dead so I grabbed a knife and I started to slit her wrist.”

Blood splashed on his face and he thought she’d bleed to death, so he put the knife on her back, walked out and called 911. “I told them exactly what I did and informed them that I would be lying on the concrete, so that the police could pick me up, that I had murdered her.”

But 6½ hours later, when Haburjak asked how he felt about Mendoza, he said, “I hope she lives. I hope she lives because I know that I told the truth and I’m not scared right now ... and the right thing will be done. And that if I was meant to fulfill something, that anyone who hears the truth and has authority, will have enough faith in me. ... I feel complete and that’s the truth.”

(Investigator Kevin O’Neill had testified earlier that he’d told Casey there was “good news,” that Mendoza was alive. “He looked me right in the eyes and told me, ‘That’s not good news, that’s bad news.’ ”)

“... I feel great about what happened and I feel privileged and honored to be put in the position that I was in,” Casey told Haburjak . “And I feel grateful that, and humbled and I feel strong that what I want, I will have.”

He continued rambling, contending Mendoza wanted to have sex, but he didn’t because that transported him out of the present — and his mind.

“And if I’m not here, then there’s a possibility that I could miss something and if I miss something, all right, and I (have sex), there’s a possibility that something else could come here and I don’t know if anything else belongs here. So I didn’t want anything else to come onto my earth and I didn’t want to leave this earth.”

Later, he demanded silence and thanked Harujak and Investigator Gus Santos for letting him hear silence. “I just wanna hear nothing but silence because I don’t know what I’m in control of,” he said.

“... I know I’m in control of myself. I know I can control everything about myself. And other than controlling myself, I don’t know what I’m in control of,” he said, his voice rising in anger, getting louder. “And all I want, all I want is silence, nothing but silence. Nothing but absolute silence until I know what I’m in control of. That’s all I want is absolute silence. Absolute silence, nothing. Absolute silence, period.

“Um, I can understand that,” Harujak replied, trying to urge him on. “... And just boiling it down for me, she wanted sex, you didn’t wanna have sex and that upset her or that upset you — that she wanted to throw herself on you?”

“No, I, I didn’t want to have sex,” Casey replied, adding that he didn’t want Mendoza to have sex with anyone else. “I don’t want anybody ever to have sex again. Period. On my earth.”

He admitted being upset she wouldn’t admit she’d had sex with anyone else, but conceded he was attracted to her when he met her at the hotel because he wanted sex, “a sexual transmutation. ... I wanted to transmute my sex power into a power that I could use to empower myself and others. And I saw that as an opportunity with her.”

He’d known her for three days and they’d had sexual relations twice, including intercourse.

“So that whole sexual transmission and everything else, that didn’t go as planned?” Haburjak asked.

“... I had to stop having sex with her,” Casey said of his earlier admission that he needed to be “in his mind, the present.”

Later, he admitted cursing at her, telling her he’d leave her, but she said she’d leave. He begged her not to tell police, that he had blood on his hands after punching his nephew’s photograph earlier to “express the importance of my life.”

“Were you that enraged?” Haburjak asked.

“I was that enraged,” Casey answered, adding that he wanted to leave the apartment that morning, because “I gotta do what I gotta do.”

“I gotta just be me,” he continued. “It feels so good. When something feels so good and you’re inspired to do it, there’s nothing that can stop you. And that’s what I wanna do. Nothing can stop me. I wanna be what I wanna be. And there’s nothing that’ll stop me from being me. OK? Nothing’ll stop me from being me, ... my existence from being taken away.”

He admitted his intentions were to kill her, then himself, but decided to call authorities instead so he’d “have peace.”

“I felt that I had enough strength to bear that authority and live up to my consequences,” he explained.

He later said he “ordered” himself to kill her. “She had orders and I had orders, OK? She was gonna follow her orders, I was gonna follow my orders.”

Haburjak asked what her orders were, but Casey wasn’t certain because she wouldn’t open up. But when Haburjak asked him to summarize that night, he said: “Yeah, I got what I wanted. Period.”

Testimony resumes this morning, when another defense medical expert may testify, along with some deputies and Casey, who told the judge he wanted to take the stand. The second defense medical expert underwent surgery Tuesday, suffered complications and was home recovering, unable to testify that afternoon. Hardt warned Miller he'd have the expert "transported" to the courtroom today if he didn't hear from doctors that the expert was unable to testify.

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