Defendant Says He Heeded Holy Voice in Killing Father

A 28-year-old Covina man testified Friday that he believed he was under a command from God to eradicate the devil when he walked into the Sepulveda Veterans Administration Hospital two years ago and shot his father to death.

Fearing that his father was going to leave the hospital and kill his mother, Christopher Michael Mazurek said he prayed several times and asked for God’s guidance.

Mazurek said God responded: “The devil must be stopped and you have to do it.”

Mazurek is charged with first-degree murder in the Oct. 20, 1984, attack in which his father, Walter C. Mazurek, 54, was shot three times at point-blank range in the hospital’s mental ward.

The younger Mazurek, a Los Angeles County firefighter, said he believed that his father, who, according to testimony, had a history of mental illness and continually beat and threatened his wife, was the embodiment of the devil.

Although Mazurek acknowledges that he pulled the trigger, defense attorney Godfrey Isaac maintains that he was mentally distressed at the time and was not in control of his senses--in other words, that the killing amounted to manslaughter.

May Argue Insanity

Isaac said he may argue that the defendant was temporarily insane at the time and is, therefore, not guilty of any crime, by reason of insanity.

Testimony during the trial, which is being heard without a jury before Van Nuys Superior Court Judge James A. Albracht, revealed that the senior Mazurek spent a lifetime in and out of mental institutions and abused his wife, Elizabeth.

She testified for the defense on Thursday that her husband battered her throughout their 30-year marriage. At times, she said, she would keep her purse in the trunk of the car and her keys in her bra to enable a fast getaway if her husband lapsed into a manic state and threatened her.

From 1963 to 1977, she said, police were summoned to her Woodland Hills home more than 100 times by relatives or neighbors who feared that her husband was out of control.

On Oct. 20, 1984, Elizabeth Mazurek telephoned her son, Christopher, telling him that her husband had called to say he was being released from the VA hospital and would kill her, Christopher Mazurek testified.

Said He Was Coming Home

“She said he told her he was coming home and he was going to kill her and bury her in the backyard and burn down the house,” Mazurek said.

“I thought, ‘This was it. This was the time when he was actually going to kill my mom.’ That’s when I cracked.”

Mazurek said he took his roommate’s gun, drove to the hospital, tucked the gun in his sock and went into the men’s room to pray.

“It was as if my person or my body had been taken over and now I was like a robot and God was telling me what to do,” Mazurek said during 1 1/2 hours on the stand.

Mazurek said he went into his father’s room but hesitated in carrying out his plan because he feared for the safety of another patient in the room. When that patient left in a wheelchair, Mazurek took it as a sign to go forward with the killing, he said.

“I felt I had to get to my dad before he got to my mom,” Mazurek said.

‘I Shot My Father’

After shooting his father, Mazurek raced from the room, threw the gun in a trash can and ran into an emergency room, telling hospital personnel there, “I just shot my father,” he said.

Mazurek said he has since joined a church and no longer believes that God directed him to kill his father.

“I believe a lot of people in this world make God out to be what they want Him to be, rather than what the Bible says He is,” Mazurek said. “I think that’s what I did.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert L. Cohen acknowledged outside the courtroom that the senior Mazurek abused his family, but he labeled the defendant’s actions “pretty drastic.”

“It’s a tragedy,” Cohen said. “No one wins in these situations.”

Mazurek has been suspended as a firefighter pending the outcome of the trial, and has been working as an air-conditioner repairman since his release from jail on his own recognizance in 1984, his attorney said.

The trial is expected to conclude Monday.