Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [25]
When the members of the medical staff questioned him the next morning about events the night before, Damien insisted that he had not intended to kill himself, though he admitted that he had been depressed for a long time, mostly due to problems relating to his family. He said he missed his girlfriend, Deanna, and that he also missed Jason Baldwin, his best friend. After a family counseling session, therapists recorded the same assessment that mental health workers in Arkansas had reached a half year earlier: that the Echols/Hutchisons were a severely troubled family. Joe Hutchison had volunteered that he barely knew his son. Pam had said that as a result of Damien’s threats, she and Joe did not want him around. But Damien’s assessment was not entirely bleak. One examiner reported that although his math skills were weak, he read at a high level, and his language skills were outstanding, even though he’d hardly attended school for the past three years. After reviewing a poem he’d written, she noted, that his “use of language is very high level and beautiful in quality, although it has a morbid appeal to it.”
In the end, the question became what to do with this troubled, perhaps gifted, adolescent, whose family had no money. After two days at the hospital, the staff no longer considered Damien a threat, either to himself or others. But his family did not want him, and Damien himself wanted to return to Arkansas. In light of the fact that he would turn eighteen in just three months, Damien’s physician wrote: “Plans for emancipation and return to Arkansas seem reasonable to me.” The hospital notified Oregon juvenile officials. They, in turn, notified Driver that Damien would be returning by bus to Arkansas, where he planned to live again with Jack Echols, and that he would contact Driver upon his arrival.
Though the plan was approved by Oregon officials, it was not okay with Driver. Four days after Damien walked out of the Oregon hospital, Driver swore out an affidavit stating that he had violated the terms of his probation “by threatening the life of his mother and father and by refusing to obey their lawful orders.”64At Driver’s request, prosecutor Fogleman filed a petition in chancery court claiming that, in addition to the threats, “Damien Echols has since continued to violate the terms of his probation by moving from the home of his parents and returning to Marion, Arkansas.”65Nowhere did the petition to have Damien’s probation revoked mention that Oregon juvenile authorities had been notified and approved of his move, or that Driver had been formally notified as well. Upon his return to Arkansas, Damien was adjudicated a delinquent, taken into custody, and sent, once again, to the region’s juvenile detention center.66
He was furious. A few hours after arriving at the detention center, as he was sitting in the recreation area with several other teenagers, he confirmed Driver’s darkest suspicions. As the center’s director reported: “One of the boys had scraped his arm a little, and it was bleeding some. Without warning, Damien grabbed the arm that was bleeding and began to suck the blood from it. The boys all stated he had been saying he had not taken his medication the night before, and he was about to ‘go off’ on them. Damien was asked why he did this, and he stated, ‘I don’t know.’ He also told staff he had threatened to kill his father and eat him.” The director concluded, “It is our opinion that Damien needs mental health treatment.”67
The court ordered Damien to be returned to the psychiatric hospital in Little Rock where he had been treated before. This time, Damien