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Strange life with wife described
By CHASE SQUIRES, Times Staff Writer DADE CITY -- Stephen Rotell's relationship with Kristina Gaime started like many others': They met at work. Now she's charged with killing one of their two sons and trying to kill the other. He's looking back at a marriage that unwound, blaming Gaime's increasingly frantic behavior and her parents' meddling. The marriage eventually ended in divorce, and the grueling custody fight prompted Family Court Judge Vivian Maye to label the couple "a poster family for dysfunction." Although Rotell has been very private about the events that led up to April 12, 1999, when his youngest son, Mathew, died at age 6, Rotell in an October deposition described life with Gaime. Rotell said he met Gaime at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa in the mid 1980s. He was a respiratory therapist; she was a nurse. They dated a few years and were married. Rotell said friends felt Gaime was "whiny, needy, flustered," but at the time, he saw nothing unusual about the woman he loved. Tensions between Rotell and Gaime's parents, Gary and Kathleen McDuffie, sparked as the couple began planning their wedding, Rotell said. The couple wanted to marry in Pennsylvania; the McDuffies wanted the ceremony in Florida. "Her father was very adamant about having it where he wanted, and he would not allow his wife to attend the wedding if it wasn't where he wanted it," Rotell told attorneys. Shortly after their first son, Adam, was born, Gaime began to change, Rotell said. She appeared to resent time Rotell spent at home with the infant when he was laid up with injuries from a car wreck, Rotell said. "It seemed like she was jealous that I was caring for him while she was at work," he said. He said things got stranger. "I think she overreacted on small simple things," Rotell testified. "One incident was there were no more hamburger buns at a party; she was upset there were no more buns. And people commented, "Jesus, it was a hamburger bun. . . . It's just a hamburger bun, just a piece of bread." And stranger. "She believed that the children were very attached to me, but not to her," Rotell said. "I think she was very self-induced depressed . . . looking at a problem and blowing it out of proportion." As things got worse, Rotell said he sought a divorce, triggering an ever-increasing battle in which Gaime tried to keep the children from him and began making allegations that he was sexually abusing them during visits. Rotell described a physical fight with Gaime's next husband. He said Gaime's father threatened him with never seeing his children again, warning after one dispute: "You're not going to see your children. We've already been to a lawyer. We know exactly what we're going to do. . . . Your days are numbered." Eventually, Rotell said, Judge Maye sided with Gaime. He wasn't allowed to see his children until after her arrest, after Mathew was dead. The whole thing, from the end of the marriage until Gaime's arrest, did not have to happen the way it did, Rotell said. He would have been happy with a fair custody agreement and a normal relationship with his children. "I think divorce is something that can happen without having great walls come up, and I hoped that's how it could be," he said. Throughout the 126-page transcript of his deposition, Rotell occasionally stopped to think. Dates eluded him sometimes. "I really try and remember my son's life every day so I can keep those memories with me," he said. "I really have no space in my head for all these things that have happened." Gaime, 37, has been in jail since she was released from a hospital after her May 1999 arrest. Investigators say she drugged her boys at their Land O'Lakes home, put them in her minivan and directed the exhaust into the cabin and climbed in with them. Gaime and Adam, then 8, survived. Mathew died. Rotell retains custody of Adam. They live in Land O'Lakes. Gaime's trial is scheduled for March 18.
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