'Dad Said He'd Kill Me,' Accused Teen Tells Court
Originally published in The Plain Dealer, October 20, 2001
AKRON — Aaron Stitt admitted to voluntary manslaughter yesterday, and the horrid details of the night he shot his father after a life of abuse were revealed. On March 28, through a drunken haze and waving a gun at 13-year-old Aaron, Dennis Stitt became prophetic.
"If things keep going like they are, I'll kill you," he said. "Or you'll kill me. But you don't have the guts, so I'll kill you."
He was wrong.
Three hours later, at 6:30 a.m., Dennis Stitt was sleeping on the couch at his Fuller St. home. Aaron awoke.
He found his father's loaded Derringer under the couch. He paced the room with it, thinking he would throw it away, then thinking his father would just buy another.
He held the gun to his father's head, looked away and pulled the trigger once.
Aaron would later tell two psychiatrists, "I felt my father was telling the truth. He would kill me."
Yesterday, Judge Judith Hunter of Summit County Juvenile Court accepted Aaron's admission to committing voluntary manslaughter, a lesser offense than the original charge of aggravated murder.
He already had admitted to the shooting that morning, when he ran to a neighbor's house and spoke to a 9-1-1 operator.
"I'm going to jail, aren't I?" he said.
Hunter will sentence the lanky, wavy-haired boy Monday morning to one to three years in a state juvenile detention facility. Aaron, now 14, could have been sentenced to detention until his 21st birthday, had the charge not been reduced.
The plea agreement was made after two psychiatrists agreed that Aaron was suffering from battered child syndrome, which caused him to believe, after enduring years of abuse, that he was in imminent danger. Prosecutors and police agreed to the lesser charge, and a trial that would have started Monday was avoided.
Aaron clenched one hand into a quivering fist as he admitted his crime. He hung his head as Hunter read from a psychiatrist's report that detailed Aaron's statements about his father, his life and the shooting.
Aaron had been abused and had witnessed abuse throughout his life, Hunter said. His father got mean when he drank. As a young boy, Aaron saw his father kick, punch and beat his mother.
He saw his father, a motorcycle enthusiast, kill a man and shoot another man in the ankle. Stitt fed Aaron's pet rabbit to a pet snake as punishment for Aaron's skipping school, Hunter said.
On March 27, Stitt, an unemployed welder, consumed more than two cases of beer. He threatened to kill Aaron's mother when he heard she had been in the neighborhood that day.
He called Aaron a punk for not fetching him a beer fast enough. He wanted his son to step outside a neighbor's house where he and Aaron ate dinner, and fight.
Back home that night, Stitt, 49 and already diagnosed with cirrhosis, drank another six-pack and began pointing his gun at Aaron while ranting about Aaron's chronic absences from school. He passed out about 3 a.m., after making the prediction that he would kill Aaron, Hunter said.
Aaron's mother, Peggy J. Fankhauser, and her mother, Janet Pace, attended the court hearing yesterday. Neither would speak to reporters. Pace said simply, "It's just a horrible situation."
Aaron had spent his life bouncing between his divorced parents. Fankhauser, 45, relinquished custody of Aaron to Stitt in October, telling the Domestic Relations Court that she—in the throes of her fourth divorce—could no longer care for her son.
Summit County Children Services case workers had received a dozen reports since 1990 that Aaron was being abused, including an anonymous report in January. All of the allegations were ruled unfounded.
"We need to find a better way to help children when they are in dangerous situations, so they don't make bad decisions like in this case," Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh said.
