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Family's past haunts killer's mother
By DAN DeWITT © St. Petersburg Times, published January 12, 1999 Jimmy Dale Smith's distant uncles, Oscar, Henry and William Purvis, and an aunt, Eula Mae Purvis, all died at the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee. Another mentally ill member of the Purvis family, Mrs. Lou Thompson, was confined there for most of the 1920s and '30s. Several other Purvises did stints in Chattahoochee, according to the hospital's records. Still others living in the family's Polk County settlement of Keysville "had to be cared for like children," said Mildred Purvis, an 85-year-old woman who married into the family and whom lawyers interviewed in preparation for Smith's murder trial. "Sad as it is to say, there were many cases (in the family) that were beyond control, that had to be institutionalized." Monday was the third anniversary of the day that Smith, now 22, shot and killed two Hernando High School teachers on a rural road north of Brooksville. His family history doesn't excuse his acts, said his mother, Linda Hale Chorvat. But the crimes' roots, she said, can be seen in the jaundice-toned photographs of her dazed and belligerent-looking ancestors. Their lives are obviously tragic, and they passed this down to her own family and to her son, she said. What strikes her as saddest, though, is that her family was too ashamed to talk about its past. Because of that, she never knew the full extent of the family history until after the murders. She never suspected her son might be schizophrenic, and neither she nor his doctors nor his teachers suspected he needed treatment that might have prevented the killings. "When I found out (about her family history), I just hung on to my bed, and I knelt down and I cried," said Chorvat, 50, whose mother was a Purvis. "If people would look at mental illness and how their kids act, they'd be a lot better off. Things shouldn't be kept secret." Chorvat wants to talk publicly about this now, she said last week, because people should be warned not to repeat her family's mistakes. She insists she is not asking for sympathy. That is exactly what she is doing, according to Smith's prosecutor, Don Scaglione, and the families of the victims, math teacher Mike Bristol and football coach Mike Imhoff. Smith has at least partly faked his mental illness to avoid facing up legally and emotionally to his crimes, Scaglione said. "Schizophrenia is not a defense for a criminal act. There are many mentally ill people who are held responsible for crimes," he said. "This is just a mother trying to make excuses for her child." Tina Bristol Estes, Mike Bristol's sister, pointed out that Smith pleaded guilty to both murders in September. Under the terms of the plea agreement, he avoided the death penalty and was instead sentenced to life in prison. "Why would they have changed pleas if they thought there was any chance of the insanity plea working?" said Estes, 41. "I don't want to hear her cry-me-a-river stories. ... I don't feel sorry for Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. I don't feel sorry for anybody who commits murder." Signs of a differenceNot even Scaglione doubts that Smith has some mental illness. To a degree, it has been obvious all of his life, Chorvat said "I always knew something was wrong with him," she said, "but I just always thought it was the divorce." She and Larry Smith, Jimmy's father, were divorced twice, the second time when he was about 10. His older brother, Mike, lived with Larry Smith, Jimmy with his mother. "I always knew that Jimmy didn't mature like my other son, and I always gave him more love and affection because I knew there was a difference," Chorvat said. His academic progression from the first to the seventh grade, when he dropped out of school, was almost nil, his mother said. His IQ, according to tests administered after his arrest, is 76, well below normal. He had, in addition, a remarkable capacity to do nothing, said people who know him. He held only one steady job, as a laborer at Florida Crushed Stone, for a few months before the killings of Bristol and Imhoff. "The only problem that I had with him was that I thought he was a lazy teenager who didn't want to work and didn't want to go to school," said his stepfather, Doug Chorvat, a firefighter with Spring Hill Fire and Rescue and the owner of a garage in Masaryktown. But it was only after a motorcycle accident on Christmas Eve 1995, family members say, that this odd teenager turned worse. In the next few days, he sometimes didn't seem to hear their questions, they said; other times he would answer after a pause of 20 or 30 seconds. At 3 a.m. on the day of the murders, "He woke up, fully dressed and walking around in a total daze," his mother said. He told her, she said, that he could read biblical passages on the ceiling of his bedroom, and he was under the powerful impression that God and the devil were the same being. 'Patient poses no threat'When the family took Smith to Oak Hill Hospital a few hours later, the doctor who treated him reached the same conclusion as the psychologists and psychiatrists who would later examine Smith for the state At least part of his behavior was an act. In his mother's presence, Smith talked of pain from his head injury, of frequent use of LSD and his hallucinations, said Dr. Ervin Anthony. But when Smith was alone in an examination room, Anthony said in his deposition, "I didn't get any evidence at all that he was seeing anything that wasn't there." A brain scan showed no significant head injury from the motorcycle accident. A blood test would show no trace of any mind-altering drugs, even alcohol. Anthony, of course, could have no knowledge of the family's history, and Smith had never previously shown any violent tendencies, Chorvat said. But she still blames Anthony for allowing her son to go free to commit the crimes and has highlighted in yellow one of the sentences he wrote on Smith's discharge papers: "Patient poses no threat to himself or others." When the family returned from Oak Hill to their mobile home on Goldsmith Road, Chorvat made lunch. Smith said he wanted to rest, so Doug and Linda Chorvat decided to go ahead with their plans to drive to Tampa. It was then that Smith started his rampage. He shot out the television and the windows, then drove, under the irrational impression that he had to go to work, to U.S. 98 north of Brooksville, where he crashed into a recreational vehicle. Carrying a rifle, a Bible and a hard hat, he dashed into the woods. He emerged on Lake Lindsey Road, about a mile to the southeast, and hailed the truck Imhoff and Bristol were riding in. When they got out, he shot them both. He was arrested an hour later, after a gunfight with a detective in the parking lot of a Spring Hill convenience store. Thoughts of dyingChorvat doesn't know exactly how her son became so detached from reality Whatever the reasons, her son has destroyed her life. Linda Chorvat, who has put in 16 years with Winn-Dixie, has been unable to work since March. "I got two psychiatrists helping me. Some days I don't want to get out of bed and put my makeup on. There's crying, depression, wanting to die," she said. Chorvat, whose own mother was murdered when Chorvat was 6 months old, said she wishes she could have been killed rather than Bristol and Imhoff. "I'm sure she does," said Estes, Bristol's sister. But as people think back to the killings, she hopes their thoughts will be with the families who hurt even more than Chorvat's. "I want people to remember the two who were killed," Estes said. "The victims have nothing."
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