Courtroom Latest Stop on Tortured Trail : Courts: Attorneys say a mentally ill drifter admits killing a 90-year-old Ventura woman. But they enter a not-guilty plea to avoid the death penalty or life in prison.

Defense attorneys said Thursday that a mentally ill drifter has admitted stabbing a 90-year-old Ventura woman to death, but they entered a not-guilty plea to ward off newly filed charges that would let prosecutors seek the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Kevin Jon Kolodziej, 25, stood quietly, his unkempt blond bangs framing fatigued brown eyes that darted around the courtroom as a judge arraigned him on a charge of murder and two charges of burglary.

Municipal Judge John R. Smiley then raised bail from $250,000 to $1 million and sent Kolodziej (pronounced kul-LO-jee) back to the padded isolation cell where he has been held since the slaying of Velasta Johnson.

While Kolodziej was in court, investigators and his mother were tracing the last steps of his meandering trail--a route that took him from a Virginia psychiatric hospital in 1989 across a rain-swept Hawaiian beach at Christmastime and into Johnson’s bedroom Jan. 17.

The more Gloria Kolodziej has learned about her son’s journey and the number of doctors, hospitals and police officers who missed the chance to block his path, the angrier she has grown.

“It’s outrageous to me,” Gloria Kolodziej said Tuesday in a telephone interview from her home in Virginia Beach, Va.

“I just found out a couple of days ago that the police had had him before this happened and they let him go,” she said. “You’ve got a patient running around in restraints and pajamas--even if you don’t have papers saying he’s mentally ill, you’ve got to know there’s a problem. You’ve got to walk him back to the hospital.”

Kevin Kolodziej grew up in Virginia Beach, a normal kid who hated school and loved surfing and jogging, his mother said.

He dropped out of high school and, at 18, left home to see California with a friend.

He returned home for a year, then went back to California to work at a Ft. Bragg diving shop and a Los Angeles-area company that rented time in saltwater isolation tanks.

At some point, he drifted through Provo, Utah, where he met an unidentified woman. She followed him to California and bore his son, who is now 3, Gloria Kolodziej said.

Then, in 1989, Kevin came home showing the first signs of what doctors later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness that usually strikes between the ages of 18 and 25, sometimes without warning.

Once, he had been gentle, sensitive, helpful and loving to his family. Now, “he was completely altered. He just was not him,” his mother said.

“I went to hug him. He would just stare off and talk to people who weren’t there,” she said. “He’d mumble real obscene things in a roomful of people. If you asked him a question, he’d just kind of stare wild-eyed at you.”

He refused to see a doctor, she said.

By January, 1991, he was quite paranoid, walking around the house with a broomstick to protect himself, she said. At one point, he nailed his bedroom door and windows shut from the inside.

His brother, Eric, who is six years younger, “had a hard time understanding” what was wrong with Kevin.

The friction between the brothers grew and eventually erupted into a fight. The mother called police, who took Kevin away for an old misdemeanor citation that he had never answered.

Two days later, he tried to knock out his eyes on the corner of a concrete sink and stab himself with a plastic knife, she said.

Police prepared papers that allowed her to have her son committed to Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Va.

Doctors medicated him with Narvane, a strong antipsychotic drug, and coaxed him back to stability, his mother said. Then, midway through his second 60-day commitment, he walked away from the hospital.

The next time she heard from him was Jan. 5, when Ventura detectives called to tell her that he was hospitalized after seriously stabbing himself in the throat and abdomen.

But in between, Kolodziej had drifted back through Utah and California and had somehow made it to Hawaii, investigators learned.

One day in December, Kolodziej was walking through the outskirts of Honolulu, clutching a rolled-up blanket like an infant in his arms, when he met a psychiatric nurse named Daniel Garrett.

“He had this lost look on his face,” Garrett said Tuesday. “He approached me, asked me if I had any spare change, that he hadn’t had anything to eat since the previous Friday. He looked really disheveled.”

Seeing that Kolodziej was mentally ill, Garrett took him in.

He let him shower and gave him clothes and some cash. He learned that Kolodziej had been living on the beach in winter rains after walking away from the psychiatric ward of Queens Medical Center in Honolulu.

A doctor there told Garrett that Kolodziej had been treated with antipsychotic drugs after he was committed for trying to hurt himself.

“He’d burst out laughing for no reason at all,” Garrett said. “He was also talking really bizarre stuff about reincarnation, how he didn’t wanna die and was there any way that they could transfer his soul . . . into a clone.”

Kolodziej also wanted to go back to the mainland to see his son, Garrett said.

With a friend’s travel coupon and $190, Garrett bought Kolodziej a Christmas present--a one-way ticket to LAX.

On the way to the airport, Kolodziej asked if he could stop to see his doctor at Queens Medical Center to get his prescription for Haldol refilled. But with less than two hours until departure, Garrett could only keep driving and promise to get the prescription refilled and mail it to Kolodziej in California.

Late on the evening of Dec. 22, Kolodziej wandered into Ojai Valley Hospital. Officials there said they asked him to leave, and he did.

He returned the next afternoon and asked to see the emergency room doctor, hospital spokeswoman Jane McCarthy said.

When staff there asked why, Kolodziej wouldn’t say, McCarthy said, adding that no doctor examined him.

“He was really evasive and odd,” she said. “So someone went and called the police,” who escorted him from the hospital.

Thirteen days later, police picked Kolodziej up at the La Quinta Inn on Valentine Road in Ventura.

Workers there had spotted him wandering in the parking lot wrapped in a blanket and bleeding from serious stab wounds that police later determined he had inflicted himself, said his attorney, Deputy Public Defender Steve P. Lipson.

For the next 12 days, Kolodziej remained in the intensive care unit at Ventura County Medical Center, periodically breaking out of restraints and scuffling with the staff, Lipson said.

Gloria Kolodziej said she called almost daily, giving doctors her son’s entire psychiatric history and asking them to take care of him.

She said she cannot understand why doctors never committed him to the county Mental Health Facility, which is just a few hundred yards away.

Then, on Jan. 17, authorities said, Kolodziej broke out of his restraints and walked through the neighborhood around the hospital.

He entered a garage and took some overalls, prompting one resident to call police.

When they encountered him, police said, they were unable to determine that he was a danger to himself or others--the legal requirement to commit someone--and asked him to walk back to his hospital bed.

Within an hour, authorities said, Kolodziej walked into the home of Velasta Johnson, picked up a kitchen knife and killed her.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris said Thursday that Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury has not decided whether to seek the death penalty.

Lipson criticized prosecutors for pressing charges that police had declined to file. He said he would fight to have a judge dismiss the burglary charges that, combined with the murder charge, allow the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Deputy Public Defender Neil B. Quinn said Kolodziej, who is back on medication, has admitted that he killed Johnson, but does not understand why.

“It was a senseless tragedy,” Lipson said after the arraignment. “But if you ask 100 people in the field if a mentally ill person with no history of this kind of thing should be executed, they’ll say it just doesn’t add up to a death penalty case.”

Meanwhile, the County Board of Supervisors plans to consider spending $15,000 to build a five-foot-high wooden fence around the grounds of the Mental Health Facility.