Larsen Called ‘Gravely Ill’ : Doctor’s Killer Faces Life in State Hospital

Vista Superior Court Judge Zalman Scherer said Monday he had “no choice” but to find Steven Alan Larsen not guilty by reason of insanity in the July 28 slaying of Escondido physician Craig Blundell.

Scherer ruled after reviewing reports by two psychiatrists and a psychologist who agreed that Larsen, 31, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when he shot Blundell out of anger that the doctor was unable to cure a stomach ailment.

According to court documents, Larsen believed that Blundell was conspiring with a former employer and other physicians to let Larsen die of the illness.

Dr. Michael Jaffe, a psychiatrist who interviewed Larsen at the court’s request, quoted Larsen as telling him:

“I shot (Blundell) as I wanted people to know my stomach was bad. I wanted people to find out about the conspiracy with Arco to kill me as my stomach was bleeding out . . . I was at the limit of my endurance . . . I had no choice.”

Larsen is expected to be committed to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino on March 4 after undergoing one more psychiatric review, at the county’s community mental health office in San Diego.

Deputy Dist. Atty. George Beall and Larsen’s attorney, Barton Sheela, agreed that Larsen will probably spend the better part--if not all--of his life in a state hospital given the seriousness of his mental illness.

“The more digging we did, the more evidence we came up with that he was gravely ill,” Beall said.

Dr. David L. Braff, director of psychiatric inpatient services at UC San Diego Medical Center, evaluated Larsen at the district attorney’s request and concluded that he “is a chronically psychotic and sad person who will need a lifetime of psychiatric treatment in order to remain in control of his paranoid psychosis.”

The district attorney’s office originally had planned to try Larsen for first-degree murder, but Beall said there was the possibility, however slim, that a jury would have found him sane and guilty of second-degree murder meaning that, conceivably, he could have been released after 7 1/2 years in prison.

In a plea bargain to avoid a jury trial, Larsen on Monday first pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, then asked Scherer to find him insane, on the weight of the reports of the two psychiatrists and the psychologist. The district attorney’s office agreed.

“If we had taken it to trial, the end result would have been this anyway,” Beall said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Walden, who heads the prosecutor’s Vista office, said, “We were concerned about the feelings of the (Blundell) family” in not taking Larsen to trial, but they “agreed with our analysis” that Larsen would have been found insane in any event.

Larsen’s family had hoped all along for Larsen to be committed to a state hospital to begin receiving treatment, Sheela said.

The district attorney’s office had not sought the death penalty, and Larsen, had he been found sane by Scherer, would have been sentenced to 27 years to life. Now, said Sheela, Larsen might well spend the rest of his life in the hospital.

Under the law, Larsen cannot be released from a state hospital until he can prove to a jury that he has regained his sanity.

Larsen, who is under constant medication, stood passively before the judge during most of the proceeding, his eyes usually closed. He spoke slowly, clearly and softly in answering the judge’s questions, and said, “I plead guilty” when asked by Scherer his plea to shooting Blundell.

His mother, Marilyn Larsen, sat teary-eyed in the first row during the proceeding, telling a reporter only that she was “relieved that Steve will now get the attention he needs.”

In his report, Braff said Larsen continues to be delusional--including believing that the television talks to him--despite having been under medication for six months, and that his prognosis for recovery “is not very good.”

“Mr. Larsen will be dangerously psychotic in the future if released from custody and if he stops taking his anti-psychotic medications,” Braff wrote. “Because of his denial of illness and narcissistic preoccupations with himself, he may easily see others as a threat and not really care too much about their safety and well-being.

“Mr. Larsen tends to see the world as threatening and demeaning and, in reaction, becomes angry and resentful about real and imagined threats and humiliations from others.

“I do not believe that his grief over Dr. Blundell’s death is total, since he probably still believes that the Arco plot was real. It is this chilling quality of self-preoccupation and lack of empathy that makes him so potentially dangerous.”

Larsen switched careers from dentistry to petroleum engineering and was hired by Arco in 1985, about the same time his paranoid schizophrenia began to manifest itself, the doctors found.

After undergoing ear surgery last year to remove a small growth, Larsen thought that a radio transmitter had been placed in his ear “and neighbors could monitor his words and thoughts,” Braff said. For that reason, Larsen talked aloud in his room, believing he would be able to give advice to the President.

He believed he had developed a bleeding ulcer, and that doctors in Bakersfield and Escondido had refused to treat it so that he would die of the ailment in order to save the company worker’s compensation costs, the reports said. Blundell was part of that conspiracy , he believed--right down to the way Blundell smiled at him.

That smile, Braff said, “only confirmed (to Larsen) the fact that Arco was trying to humiliate him and he saw the friendly smile as one of humiliating disdain.”

Larsen shot Blundell five times in his office after Blundell told him he was unable, after tests, to determine what was wrong with Larsen’s stomach.

“Mr. Larsen felt that his life was threatened by Dr. Blundell’s inaction,” Braff wrote. “He intended to force Dr. Blundell to tell the truth and therefore to receive the medical treatment he felt was needed. He believed that he was ‘right’ and that he was redressing the terrible wrong imposed upon him by Dr. Blundell and Arco.”