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Defendant was deranged, says family

Relatives of Kurt Walczak testify of his longstanding mental illness. He is accused of killing his father.

By ASHLEE CLARK
Published June 30, 2006

Adam Bonsignori says he has known Kurt Walczak for nearly 20 years and has only seen him in good mental health twice.

The first time was in 1988, when Bonsignori married Walczak's twin sister, Karen. The other time was in 1996, when Walczak began seeing a psychiatrist.

But an intermittent cycle of therapy and prescribed medications didn't end Walczak's fixation on delusional conspiracies against him, and Bonsignori said he and his wife didn't feel safe when they briefly lived with him and his parents.

"We were locking our doors and praying that we would still be alive in the morning," Bonsignori said.

Bonsignori outlined his brother-in-law's history of mental illness at Walczak's first-degree murder trial Thursday. He said Walczak was "absolutely, unequivocally not in his right mind" when he shot his father, Gerard Walczak, on Nov. 28, 2003.

Walczak, 43, is charged with killing his father with a 10 mm Glock handgun at his home on Magnolia Drive in Clearwater. If convicted, Walczak faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The defense witnesses, including Walczak's sister and his former psychiatrist and psychologist, all agreed that Walczak suffered from mental illness for which he never received consistent treatment.

"The truth is that my brother's crazy," Karen Bonsignori said. "He's delusional. He's psychotic. I don't believe he had one clue what he was doing."

Bonsignori told jurors her brother's severe mental problems seemed to surface with a suicide attempt around 1986.

She said he later believed members of the Ku Klux Klan were following him.

But Gerard Walczak became the focus of those delusions after Kurt Walczak injured himself in an aunt's bathroom in 2002, Karen Bonsignori said.

"If I had to hear one more time about that fall and the shower mat, I thought I was going to scream," she said.

Kurt Walczak visited his sister the morning of Gerard Walczak's death. He told her he wanted more mental help.

Psychiatrist Bala Rao, who saw Kurt Walczak intermittently from 1996 to 2000, said he diagnosed Walczak with paranoid schizophrenia and prescribed Risperdal, an anti-psychotic medication. Walczak's mental state appeared to improve, but he later became agitated and delusional when he stopped treatment, Rao said.

Walczak saw another mental health professional intermittently between 2001 and August 2003, according to testimony.

By November 2003, when he shot his father, Walczak was not sane, said Valerie R. McClain, a court-appointed psychiatrist who evaluated the defendant. At the time of the shooting, she said, Walczak thought his father was holding a gun behind a manila envelope.

But the state's first rebuttal witness, Steven O'Neal, a psychologist who also evaluated Walczak, said Walczak was sane at the time of the shooting and had a mixed personality disorder.

Testimony from the state's rebuttal witnesses will continue today. The case is expected to go to the jury this afternoon.

Ashlee Clark can be reached at aclark@sptimes.com or 445-4158.

[Last modified June 30, 2006, 06:01:09]