FULLERTON : Prosecutor Disputes Man’s Satan Defense

A prosecutor told jurors Monday that 21-year-old Michael Robert Pacewitz concocted his statement about fighting Satan when he stabbed to death a 3-year-old girl in Fullerton last March and that he actually killed her to get back at his mother.

Pacewitz, a former mental patient, called police just before dawn March 3 and told them that he had killed 3-year-old Marcelline Onick at the apartment where she lived with her mother and baby brother. Police found the girl’s body near the baby brother, who was crying. She had been stabbed 44 times, and her head was nearly severed.

Just a few hours before he attacked the girl, Pacewitz has admitted, he stabbed his mother and her boyfriend at their Anaheim apartment. The two survived, although his mother suffered serious neck injuries.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown told jurors in closing arguments at Pacewitz’s trial in Santa Ana Monday that the defendant deliberately went to Fullerton to kill the little girl.

“He knows he botched the killing of his mother,” Brown said. “He thought to himself, ‘How can I next get at my mother?’ He knows his mother loves Marcelline, treats her like a granddaughter. Who did he choose to kill? Someone precious to her.”

His mother, Elena Fontaine, baby-sat Marcelline for the girl’s mother, Joanne Boydston, when the two women lived near each other in Anaheim.

After the attack at his mother’s home, Pacewitz hitchhiked to Fullerton to an apartment building where he once lived with friends and where Boydston resided in an upstairs unit.

Boydston first left her children with her infant son’s father for the night. But he left, placing the child in the care of one of Pacewitz’s friends in the downstairs apartment. Pacewitz later took over his friend’s baby-sitting duties.

Pacewitz told defense psychiatrists that he stabbed his mother because he thought that she was Satan and would kill him.

In closing arguments, Pacewitz’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender E. Robert Goss Jr., told jurors that his client did not have the mental capability of committing first-degree murder.

“What’s important is what was on his mind,” Goss said, arguing that at most, Pacewitz was guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

“He thought the only way to get rid of the devil was to completely sever her head,” Goss told the jury.

But prosecutor Brown countered that the most significant evidence that Pacewitz made up the Satan story was his statement during and after the two stabbing incidents.

“He doesn’t say anything about Satan to his mother,” Brown told the jury. “When he dials 911, he doesn’t tell police he killed Satan. He says: I murdered a little baby girl.’ Boy, there’s a telling statement for you.”