A Mentally Ill Man Killed His Grandmother and Lit Her on Fire in Front of Two Children

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For two weeks, 30-year-old Joseph Elija Ettima was on trial to determine if he was legally insane when he killed his grandmother and set her body ablaze in front of two small children. He entered the Orange County courtroom only briefly last week to deliver a message to the nonplused lady stenographer: “Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,” he said softly, in a vaguely Spanish accent.

The judge asked Joseph if he was waiving his right to appear in court during the testimony of his lawyer-ordered psychiatrist.  Joseph, dressed in casual clothes (khakis and a summery red plaid shirt) with long dreads dangling down his back, politely confirmed he would rather remain in his cell. “Sincerely,” Joseph told the stenographer and the judge before being escorted out of court. “Buenas noches.”

“At least he doesn’t hiss at you, like he does at me,” joked Deputy District Attorney Sonia Bailey. Then the jury filed back into court from their lunch break; they were there to decide where Joseph was going to spend the rest of his life. Only a few weeks earlier, the same twelve citizens found Joseph guilty of murder, arson, robbery, and child abuse. They began deliberations this week to figure out if Joseph was legally—not medically—insane when he stabbed his grandmother and then lit her on fire. Being legally insane would mean that he has a mental disease or defect, and because of that disease or defect, he didn't understand that his actions were morally or legally wrong when he committed them.

If the jury found Joseph insane, he would have been sent to a state-run medical facility where he could have eventually been released—if he was deemed fully recovered by a clinical staff.

The burden of proof was on the defense to prove Joseph’s insanity. [1]

And you know what? They had a pretty good case.

In January 2009, Joseph was freshly paroled out of prison after an eight-year stint for possessing an illegal weapon. Joseph dropped in on his 69-year-old grandmother, Emma Hardwick-Street, in the working class neighborhood of Los Alamitos, to see if she could give him a place to crash. Emma refused—she was full up from parental custody of Joseph’s eight-year-old nephew and three-year-old niece—and then a fight erupted between Joseph and Emma. His nephew, Matt, was downstairs when he heard his grandmother wailing. He ran upstairs and found Joseph straddling their grandmother, pummeling her with blows. Joseph then pulled out a knife and stabbed Emma to death.

“I’m now free,” Joseph said to his nephew.

Joseph started barking orders at Matt, asking him to bring him anything that could catch on fire—clothes, a broom, whatever. Joseph dug through Emma’s closet, snatched up some of her belongings, and then cleaned out her bathroom cabinet. He nabbed slippers, tennis rackets, toothpaste, deodorant, a bag of cough drops, a box of breath mints, and a plastic bag of coins. Then he went into the children’s room and yanked some of their clothes from the drawers. Joseph stuffed it all into a backpack and then dragged Emma’s body into a bedroom and laid her on top of the bed.

Matt came back upstairs with the flammables; he was joined by his crying three-year-old cousin, Georgia. Joseph piled the clothes on top of Emma, doused the carpet with rubbing alcohol, poured the rest out on Emma’s body, and handed his nephew a box of matches. Joseph commanded Matt to strike a match and toss it onto his grandmother’s body.

The third grader didn’t move until his uncle threatened to kill him and Georgia.  Matt lit the match, threw it on the bed, and the bed went orange with fire.

Joseph rushed the kids outside, locked the front door behind them, thrust the tennis racket and the backpack filled with clothes into Matt’s hands, and then took off running down the street.

Four months later, Joseph resurfaced at a border gate between Mexico and Belize.  Mexican authorities deported him in April 2009 when he attempted to escape US marshals while boarding a commercial flight from Mexico City. Joseph spent the next five years in jail awaiting trial. Partially, it took so long for Joseph’s criminal trial to start because he refused leave his cell to come to court several times.

While in Orange County’s Theo Lacy correctional facility, Joseph made a brief, but memorable, appearance on MSNBC’s prison docu-series Lockup. The footage shows a barefoot Joseph wielding a broken mop handle and hurling cleaning products at over a dozen sheriff’s deputies. For months in prison, Joseph refused to speak with any psychiatrists because he insisted he wasn’t mentally ill.

“My first two visits with him were friendly, even to the point of being flirtatious, which is inappropriate because I’m old enough to be his mother,” Dr. Nancy Kaser-Boyd testified during Joseph’s sanity trial. “He was smiling and polite and [talked] about being Nigerian royalty, inheriting a lot of money, and going to back Nigeria, and being a congressman there.” Joseph had refused to speak to two other court-appointed doctors before Nancy’s visits. She testified that she was able to complete three four-hour sessions with Joseph by dodging his questions about her intentions to testify at his trial for the defense.

Nancy’s diagnosis of Joseph: schizoaffective disorder with psychotic features and bipolar depression.  “He believed he had a microchip in his head and people could hear his thoughts,” she told the jury. Of course, the microchip delusion is a commonly known symptom of psychosis, and it could make a skeptic believe Joseph was repeating what he saw on a crime drama to escape jail. But what makes Joseph so different from other defendants who enter an insanity plea is how much paper is attached to him. Joseph spent most of his life in institutions, and several different doctors have diagnosed Joseph since he hit puberty, and they all have said the same thing: This guy is fucking crazy.

Joseph was born in California to a Nigerian father. Social services tagged him as high risk for abuse and neglect at age four. A doctor evaluated Joseph at age eight and reported that he likely suffered from early onset schizophrenia. His speech and thoughts were disorganized. He seemed paranoid, anxious, overly guarded, and overly distracted. “There is substantial evidence that [the] child has auditory hallucination suffering thought disorder,” the doctor wrote in 1991. “If schizophrenia bears out, major neuroleptic medication will be needed.” In other words, the doctor diagnosed Joseph with an organic brain disease that creates delusions, and believed Joseph needed serious psychotropic medication to prevent him losing control of his mind and body.

Joseph’s father died when Joseph was nine years old, causing his condition and behavior to deteriorate. He was sent to live in a psychiatric home for young children, where he told doctors he had visions of his mother beating him and of bodies being dismembered. He heard a low murmuring voice that said, “Joseph be bad.” Sometimes, Joseph would suffer a night terror and run screaming out of the facility and into the street.

The next diagnostic report came from when Joseph stayed in juvenile hall from 1997 to 1999 for attempted arson and assault. While at juvi, he was taken repeatedly to the hospital for banging his head on walls and eating staples, bolts, an ice pack, and cleaning fluids.

From 2000 to 2008, Joseph was in jail for probation violations and a weapon’s charge. His file got thick with manic episodes and violent outbursts against staff and other prisoners. In 2002, Joseph set his mattress on fire in the jail’s psychiatric ward. His psychiatrist wrote in a report, “Patient has a severe mental disorder and a low IQ” and suffers from “severe psychotic symptoms.” The doctor added that Joseph was “very defensive and denied being mentally ill.”

Joseph was put on the involuntary medication program, where doctors forced him to a take a cocktail of psychotropic drugs to stave off hallucinations. After two years of steady medication, Joseph’s psychiatrist reported good results: He was “behaviorally stable” with significantly “fewer incidents” and was overall much improved.

Once released from prison in 2008, Joseph went off his meds.

Update: The jury came back from deliberations on Thursday afternoon and found that Joseph was sane when he killed his grandmother and lit her on fire in January 2009.

[1] After John Hinkley Jr. was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting Ronald Regan, Congress approved legislation to shift the burden of proof to the defense.  Natasha Vargas-Cooper is an independent journalist living in Los Angeles. She tweets here.