Prescription For Murder?

For more than three years, the Pittman family has been the talk of Chester, S.C.

No one can quite understand what happened to Joe and Joy Pittman, and their 12-year-old grandson, Christopher. reports on this story that first aired April 17, 2005.

"They were well accepted," says Pastor Chris Snelgrove. "Joe was a character. He just loved to laugh. He had a personality that was legendary, I guess."

There was also no question that Joe was tough. "You always knew where he stood, what he felt on every issue. There was no question about what he thought," Snelgrove says.

Joe's soft spot was his grandson, Christopher, who lived in central Florida with his father and sister, Danielle. Chris spent as much time as he could in South Carolina with his grandparents.

"He was extremely well-mannered and extremely shy. Those would be the two dominant characteristics that I saw, meeting Chris for the first time," Snelgrove says. "Christopher was funny. He was gregarious. When he was comfortable, you really saw the fun-loving side of him."

But when Chris left Chester and returned to Florida, everything changed. His mother, who had abandoned him as an infant, came back into his life only to suddenly leave again without warning. His father was getting his third divorce. It was too much for Chris, and he fell apart.

Chris' father, also named Joe, says his son ran away. "He just wanted the security of (his grandparents) Nanna and Pop Pop," he says.

Chris didn't get far. Police found him 15 miles from home and brought him back to his father.

Faced with having to stay with his father, Chris became desperate. In front of his older sister, Danielle, Chris grabbed a knife and threatened to kill himself.

"He says, 'You know, I'd rather die than live in this house with you and dad,' " Danielle says. "I was scared that he was going to hurt himself."

Chris wanted to live with his grandparents and, after his suicide threat, his father finally gave in. But the Christopher Pittman who returned to Chester was a changed boy.

Chris became "this withdrawn person who wouldn't look me in the eyes," Snelgrove says. "I would characterize his behavior in church as just sort of fidgety."

Early on the evening of Nov. 28, things were particularly tense when the family arrived for church. Snelgrove says Chris was kicking at the back of the piano bench, and Joe got a little agitated. The Pittmans left church early to take Chris home.

Four hours later, the Pittman house was in flames.

"I got a call saying that my mom and dad's house was on fire," says Chris' father, Joe. "We left for South Carolina. On our way up there, we found out via cell phone that they had found a body. And when we got there, they told us that it was two bodies."

Joe Pittman, 66, and his 62-year-old wife, Joy, had both been shot in the head before their house was set on fire.

Snelgrove says Chris could not be found, and that there was no evidence that he was in the house. The next morning, Chris was found miles from home. He told police he'd been kidnapped but after hours of questioning, however, police say Pittman made a stunning confession. He admitted he had shot his grandparents.

"How could a child who loved his grandparents do something like that?" Snelgrove says. "It's beyond comprehension. We still don't have a way of talking about it."

Chris' father insists his son is innocent.

"He didn't do it," he says. "That's what I'm telling you. He did not do it."

Delnora Duprey, known as Del, is Chris' maternal grandmother. She says she can't believe that her grandson has been charged with two counts of murder.

"He's a very thoughtful child. … And that's why all of this is just totally out of character for Chris," she says. "Totally out of character."

Del helped raise Chris after her daughter, Chris' mother, abandoned the family. She says her grandson was sad but never angry or violent, which is why Chris' family went looking for another explanation — and they say they found one.

"He did not do it. Zoloft did," says Chris' father, Joe. He believes that his parents would be alive today if Chris had never taken Zoloft.

Zoloft, a drug that has been on the market since the early '90s, is the most prescribed anti-depressant in America today. Pittman's family says that this medication, for which more than 30 million prescriptions a year are written, turned a 12-year-old boy into a monster.

His family says it started about a month before the shootings, after Chris threatened suicide in Florida. He was diagnosed with depression and put on the drug Paxil. When he moved to South Carolina, a doctor switched him to Zoloft. His family now believes that side effects from Zoloft caused Chris to kill.

"I have no doubts whatsoever that it was the medication," Del says. The family says Chris appeared to be displaying side effects from the medication just days before the shootings. His older sister, Danielle, says he seemed manic at Thanksgiving: "He just acted like a crazy man."

Chris' aunt, Mindy Rector, says that Chris complained about the pills he was taking: "He says, 'Aunt Mindy, I don't like taking them. I feel like my skin is crawling and that I'm just on fire.' "

Side effects are one thing but could a commonly prescribed drug lead to violence? Pfizer, the drug's manufacturer, says no but Chris' defense, led by Texas lawyer Andy Vickery, says yes.

"I think something switched the safety switch off. The inhibition that keeps us from doing violent things, that something flipped," Vickery says. "He is not an evil child. He's not a bad boy. He's a good kid, and he never hurt man nor beast until that drug."

Vickery makes his living battling drug companies in civil cases, where a lot of money is at stake. In this case, the toughest of his career, a child's life is at stake, and Vickery is doing it for free.

"The theory of our case is that a powerful mind-altering drug was given to a kid that shouldn't have got it in the first place. And it triggered very violent behavior," Vickery says.

The-drug-made-me-do-it defense might seem far-fetched had it not been for hearings held last year by the Food and Drug Administration. Young patients and their parents came forward to talk about disturbing side effects from Zoloft and similar drugs:

The FDA has ordered what is known as a "black-box warning," cautioning that Zoloft and similar drugs can increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents. Still, Vickery knew he had an uphill battle proving the drug can also lead to murder.

"These drugs trigger violent behavior, frequently towards oneself, but also towards others," says Vickery, who along with his team of lawyers, argued a rarely used type of insanity plea, known as involuntary intoxication.

"When someone takes a medication under a doctor's advice, they don't expect to become intoxicated to the point that they are out of their minds," Vickery says.

A judge has ruled that Chris will be tried as an adult. If he is convicted of the two murders, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

For three years, Chris has been held in a juvenile facility and his lawyer, Hank Mims, was determined to get him out on bail. The judge tentatively agreed to allow Chris out on a $175,000 bond but there was a condition: Chris had to stay in the state of South Carolina even though the rest of his family lived in Florida.

Chris' grandmother, Del, and Chris' great grandmother, Ruth, traveled to South Carolina, where they rented an apartment to give Chris a place to stay.

At the Charleston, S.C., courthouse, Chris, now 16, went on trial for the murders of his grandparents.

From the outset, it was clear that prosecutor Barney Giese believed this is a case of murder, pure and simple.

"This is as vicious a case as you're going to see. Vicious," says Giese, who argues that the case has nothing to do with the medication Chris was taking. "I don't think that Zoloft, to be honest, had any effect on him. I really don't. Our law is very specific. Did you know the difference between right and wrong?"

Giese and his chief deputy, John Meadors, believed they would be able to prove that Chris knew exactly what he was doing when he killed his grandparents in Chester on Nov. 28, 2001.

"I think Chris found out when he came up there that they were loving, caring grandparents," Meadors says. "But they also said, 'We're going to discipline and try to get him straight.' And I don't think he wanted that."

They said events began spiraling out of control that morning when Chris attacked a much younger student on the school bus. The Pittmans then became more upset when their grandson acted out at church that evening, becoming fidgety, and kicking the piano bench.

That night, prosecutors said Chris simply snapped and killed his grandparents. They also say that what Chris did next was not the behavior of a person under the influence of medication.

"He's rational enough to know that he's left evidence, which is his dead grandparents," Meadors says. "He's rational enough and non-psychotic enough to know that he needs to burn it."

At that point, Chris stole money, a small arsenal of his grandfather's weapons, and escaped in his grandparents' truck. He was 35 miles away when the truck got stuck in the woods, and Chris ran into two deer hunters. His first words, says Roland Pennington, were that "a black man killed his grandparents and brought him here."

The hunters, Pennington and Terry Robinson, found Chris' story and his behavior to be very strange. Robinson says Chris "showed no kind of emotion, like somebody that would be kidnapped and brought here."

Chris was found at 10 in the morning. His story about a black kidnapper was so detailed that police initially believed him. Later that evening, however, Chris' story began to unravel and he finally told the truth to a sheriff's investigator.

Lucinda McKeller, now with SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, was then a sheriff's investigator experienced with working with children.

"He was cool and calm," she says of her conversation with Chris. "I was very impressed with him."

McKeller says Chris remained calm throughout an afternoon of playing cards and watching TV until he finally told the truth and admitted to the killings.

"He said, 'I'm not sorry.' He said they deserved it,' " McKeller says.

Arson investigator Scott Williams also questioned Chris.

"To actually hear him say, 'I'm not sorry,' to what he had done to the people that he supposedly loved the most in his life was pretty shocking," says Williams, who adds that Chris did not seem psychotic.

"This was a very meticulous crime," McKeller says. "He was smart enough to do it at 12."

Four days into the trial, the defense won a major battle. For the first time in three years, Chris was allowed out of custody. Most of Chris' family was at his trial in Charleston — all except for his father, Joe. He was in Florida, where he lives and where his parents are buried.

"I'm sure when this is all said and done, we're gonna pick the pieces up and put them back together again the best we can," Joe says.

On this day, Joe is thinking about the weapon his son used: a shotgun that his father had given to him as a child.

"The first gun he ever gave me was the .410 — the .410 Christopher used to kill my mom and dad with," Joe says.

Joe was not with his son in South Carolina because defense attorneys asked him to stay away. They were worried that if Joe took the stand, he would be repeatedly questioned about the way he disciplined Chris as a child. Joe denies abusing his son, but Chris told several people that his father beat him, and that was the reason he asked to live with his grandparents in Chester.

The issue of abuse is important because prosecutors argue it's what drove Chris to kill his grandparents. They say that after a lifetime of harsh discipline at the hands of his father, getting paddled by his grandfather was just too much for Chris to take.

But defense witnesses came to court with a very different theory. Lanette Atkins, a forensic psychiatrist, says that on the night of Nov. 28, side effects from Zoloft became so intense that Chris actually became "psychotic" and was hearing what she calls "command hallucinations" that ordered him to shoot his grandparents.

"I think he had no control over killing his grandparents," says Atkins, who adds that "the period of time he was psychotic may have been very brief."

Atkins says lack of emotions after the murder was yet another side effect of the medication. Atkins, who evaluates juvenile defendants for the state of South Carolina, usually testifies on behalf of the prosecution so her diagnosis took many of her colleagues by surprise.

"Everybody was telling me I was crazy. All my colleagues," Atkins says. "You know, 'How could you possibly support that defense?' "

She's not the only medical professional who testified for Chris at his trial. Dr. Richard Kapit, a scientist who worked for the FDA for 14 years, once approved Zoloft for human clinical trials. He now believes that the medication can drastically alter the behavior of some juveniles, causing a chemically induced anger.

But for every doctor who blames Zoloft, there's another who says Chris knew exactly what he was doing.

"There was no evidence that he wasn't thinking correctly. There was lots of evidence that he knew what he had done was wrong," says psychiatrist James Ballenger, who points to the story Chris told police. Blaming the killings on a black man, Ballenger says, clearly shows that Chris knew he had done something wrong.

Another psychiatrist, Dr. Julian Sharman, spoke to Chris just hours after the murders.

"Asked if he loved or hated them, he responds, 'I loved them and sometimes I hated them,' " Sharman says. "Asked if he feels that they deserved what happened, he says, 'They asked for it.' "

Pfizer, Zoloft's manufacturer, does acknowledge that their research shows some increased risk of aggression while on the drug. But Dr. Steven Romano, a psychiatrist and a vice president of Pfizer, told the jury there is no link to homicide.

The jury didn't hear from Chris himself. His lawyers, after much consideration, recommended that he not take the stand. But in an exclusive interview, shortly before his case went to the jury, Chris talked to 48 Hours.

He said he wanted the jury to know that the medicine made him kill his grandparents.

"You just can't control yourself," Chris says. "It was just like you sitting there watching TV. I mean, everything that, you know, going on. It can't be stopped."

Chris says that as he lay in bed the night of Nov. 28 in his grandparents' home, he became overwhelmed by anger.

"It's just like it all just exploded. I mean, just exploded," he says. "The littlest thing would set me off. I was like a bomb that was ready to blow up."

Chris told investigators that he had been angry because his grandfather had paddled him that evening. But he now says there was no discipline, and that he killed only because voices in his head told him to. "It's just like these voices in my head, just echoing in my head, getting louder and louder and faster."

What were these voices saying? "Kill," says Chris.

He says the voices were "strong enough so that I did it." Was he aware of what he had done? "I thought it was all a dream," he says.

But seeing the evidence in court day after day has made the dream all too real.

"The judge called us in at the end of the day, and started to explore possibilities the case could be resolved on a plea," Vickery says.

The possibility was voluntary manslaughter and the sentence was up to the judge — from two to 30 years. But a confident Vickery would rather rely on the jury.

"We just can't conceive of 12 people unanimously finding this boy guilty," Vickery says.

Something as simple as eating pizza with his family is what Chris said he'll be most afraid of losing if he's convicted of murder.

"The hardest thing I have is not being with my family," Chris says. "I don't really have a problem being in jail. It's just being away from my family."

And the one family member Chris hasn't seen in months is his father. Two days before his case went to the jury, though, Chris' dad showed up. Instantly, whatever bad blood had been between them was gone.

"As I've gotten older, I realize that he's made a lot of mistakes that I can forgive him for," Chris says. "He didn't know how to discipline us. He did what he thought was right."

But was Chris' anger toward his father the spark that led to the killings, a spark inflamed by medication?

In his closing argument, Vickery tells the jury that Chris would never have killed had it not been for Zoloft: "There is no rational explanation. This wasn't a bad kid. He wasn't in trouble in school. He was a good boy."

The last words, however, came from Giese, who provides a powerful demonstration to remind the jury how Chris killed his grandparents.

"That's as malicious a killing and a murder as you're ever going to get," Giese says.

If the jury believes that Chris is a cold-blooded killer, he could get life in prison. But if they believes the anti-depressant he was taking turned him into a killer, they could set him free.

Does Chris think he's paid enough of a price for the crime he committed?

"Yes and no. Yes, in a way," Chris says. "But no in a way, too, because in a way I feel I should be in jail for the rest of my life. It was me, but it wasn't me."

Meanwhile, Danielle worries about her brother's future: "I honestly think he should come home. He's gonna have to go through and live with the fact that he did this the rest of his life. I think that's punishment enough."

After seven hours of deliberation, there was a decision. The jury found Christopher Pittman guilty of the murders of his grandparents, Joe and Joy Pittman.

"I felt just devastated. That ripped my heart out," Vickery says.

Under South Carolina law, the most lenient sentence allowed is 30 years and that's what the judge gave Chris.

Immediately, Chris' bail was revoked and he was whisked back to a holding cell to begin serving his sentence.

"I don't understand how a jury, in two weeks, can think that they know someone well enough to convict him guilty of this kind of crime," says Chris' sister, Danielle.

One juror, Steven Platt, said he and others simply couldn't accept the defense claim that a drug could cause a person to kill: "A million people take it every day. Why would he be the only one that reacts like this?"

"The State of South Carolina has completed this comedy of horrors by inflicting one last crime upon this man. None of it makes sense," says Snelgrove, who now questions whether destroying a third life, Chris Pittman's, really equals justice. "We have been left with a question we must resign ourselves that we will never have the answer to, of how this could happened and why. And we have to be content that we're not going to have the answer for a long, long time."

Pfizer, Zoloft's manufacturer, says "Zoloft didn't cause his problems, nor did the medication drive him to commit murder."

Unless he wins an appeal or a new trial is ordered, Chris Pittman will be
in prison until he's 45.