Loukaitis ‘Over The Edge’ 10 Days Before Killings, Psychiatrist Testifies Teen’s Psychological Disorder Heightened By Mother’s Plans To Kill Herself, Jury Told

Barry Loukaitis “snapped” about 10 days before he killed two classmates and a teacher at a Moses Lake junior high school, a defense psychiatrist testified Wednesday.

Loukaitis had then been suffering from a serious psychological disorder for more than a year. He “snapped … at the time his mother informed him of her suicide plans” in late January 1996, Dr. John Petrich of Redmond told a King County jury.

Loukaitis came to believe that classmate Manuel Vela, 14, was “the embodiment of evil in the world,” Petrich said.

“He began to believe that if Manuel would die … if he killed Manuel,” things might get better.

Like Clint Eastwood in the western movies Loukaitis enjoyed, he felt “he had to take matters into his own hands,” Petrich said. “Whatever happened to him didn’t matter in the big scheme of things,” and Loukaitis felt he might well die carrying out his delusional mission.

Petrich was still on the witness stand, being cross-examined by prosecutors, when court recessed Wednesday. When he has completed his testimony today, the defense will rest, lawyer Mike Frost told Kittitas County Superior Court Judge Michael Cooper.

Loukaitis, 14 at the time of the killings, is being tried as an adult on three counts of aggravated first-degree murder, one count each of attempted murder and second-degree assault, and 16 counts of kidnapping.

Now 16, he is pleading innocent by reason of insanity. If convicted, he would face life in prison.

On Feb. 2, 1996, he dressed in black Western gear and armed himself with three guns and more than 70 rounds of ammunition.

In the early afternoon, he went to his fifth-period algebra class and killed Vela, classmate Arnold Fritz, also 14, and math teacher Leona Caires, a former Coeur d’Alene educator. He wounded Natalie Hintz, then 13, who still has not fully recovered from her wounds.

He was arrested at the scene.

Like Dr. Julia Moore on Tuesday, Petrich diagnosed Loukaitis as suffering from bipolar disorder, mixed, with prominent depressive and psychotic delusional features. The disorder is also called manic depression. The term “mixed” indicates the boy was subject to manic highs and depressive lows simultaneously for at least a week. The psychotic aspect means he lost touch with reality, though Petrich said his condition has improved.

In the months before the attack, there were times Loukaitis “felt like God,” Petrich said. But he also was depressed “just about all day every day except … when he felt like God.”

He said the boy’s illness began to manifest itself in December 1994, during a period when his parents had separated, and became progressively worse, affecting his grades and relationships.

He said Loukaitis told him he remembered being at a school function when he was struck by a change in himself - “I hated the kids around me.” He felt different, as if he didn’t belong.

It was a “striking feeling” that stayed with him until the shooting, Petrich said. For the rest of his eighth-grade year he hated people, including his father and sometimes his mother. At times he “felt superior to other kids for no good reason,” the doctor said.

At the start of ninth grade, in the fall of 1995, other students reported Loukaitis “seemed like a different person,” Petrich said. He stopped speaking in class and seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts, sometimes talking to himself. Sometimes he called other kids “stupid” in the school hallways.

In January 1996, after filing for divorce, his mother, Jody Phillips, told Loukaitis she planned to kill herself, and that he would have to decide where he wanted to live when she was dead.

He urged her to try to exorcise her feelings by writing poetry or a play - methods that had helped him deal with his negative feelings, Petrich said.

As she became more consumed with her own problems, Petrich said, Loukaitis told him, “I gave up on my mother. I didn’t care anymore.”

They had always been “unusually … even abnormally close,” the doctor noted.

Some days later - on a school day between Jan. 19 and Jan. 28 - Loukaitis snapped, Petrich said - “went over the edge, broke with reality” and became obsessed with killing Vela.

The delusion “continued to develop … till that very morning” of Feb. 2, the psychiatrist said. Loukaitis became “increasingly more psychotic, more incapacitated.”

The shootings “were a manifestation of his psychosis,” Petrich said.

Under questioning from defense attorney Michele Shaw, he said he did not believe Loukaitis understood the nature and quality of his actions, or the difference between right and wrong, at the time of the shootings.

On the Sunday before the attack, Loukaitis took bullets for the .30-30 rifle he would use from the trunk of his father’s car, Petrich said.

On Jan. 31, two days before the shootings, school was canceled and he watched three Clint Eastwood westerns with his father. That afternoon, his mother went with him to buy the long black cowboy duster he wore during the assault.

The trial was moved here due to concerns about media coverage in Grant County, 175 miles to the east. Cooper was assigned the case after a Grant County judge disqualified himself.

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