Mother Pleads Insanity in Girls’ Deaths : Courts: Prosecutor concurs, saying prison would be ‘injustice’ for Kristine Cushing.

In an unusual move, prosecutors agreed Friday to accept an insanity plea for a Laguna Niguel woman who admitted killing her two young daughters and trying to shoot herself.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey L. Robinson said that the October, 1991, shooting of the two children by Kristine Marie Cushing was a “tragic” act, and that “it would be an injustice to find her sane” and send her to prison.

Instead, Robinson said, the 39-year-old Cushing will be committed to a state mental facility for what he expected would be “a very long time,” and will not be freed--if ever--without returning to Orange County Superior Court for an additional proceeding to determine whether her sanity had been restored. If the court finds her sane, she could be released.

Cushing, a Brownie troop leader, room mother and Sunday school teacher, was in the midst of a divorce from her husband, Marine Lt. Col. John P. Cushing Jr., when the shootings took place shortly before midnight on Oct. 13. The couple had separated several months earlier but continued to share the house. Col. Cushing, a Gulf War veteran and commander of an El Toro-based fighter jet squadron, was away on a fishing trip at the time.

Kristine Cushing called 911 to report the shootings and, according to court documents, told the first sheriff’s deputy to arrive at the scene: “I’m crazy, I shot my daughters. They’re upstairs.”

At Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, where she was treated later that night for a minor self-inflicted wound to her head, Cushing told a nurse: “I was depressed so I shot my daughters. I’ve been depressed for about three months,” according to court records. On Nov. 6, 1991, Cushing pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. In order to plead not guilty by reason of insanity Friday, Kristine Cushing first had to change the earlier plea to guilty, acknowledging that she used a gun to kill her daughters, Amy Elizabeth, 8, and Stephanie Marie, 4, with a .38-caliber handgun. This meant she faced the possibility of a 55-years-to-life sentence.

“She understands now and (has) for some time that she is the person who pulled the trigger and shot the children,” said her attorney, Michael J. Cassidy. “She did it because she had a mental illness.”

He added that “she’s in such a grieving stage.”

Cassidy praised Robinson’s action in accepting the plea, saying the prosecutor “went out of his way to be very fair.”

Initially, Robinson charged Cushing with first-degree murder and began building a criminal prosecution. However, he said after the proceedings, “as we attempted to bolster that case” it became clear that something “wasn’t right.”

Investigators who traveled to Massachusetts, Florida and Northern California found “not one iota of information to show that she was anything but a very giving, caring, sweet human being,” Robinson said.

Doctors and investigators found in defense and court-ordered examinations “evidence of progressive mental illness” pre-dating the shooting, he said. “That’s what convinced us.”

Cushing had been under a psychiatrist’s care for depression for at least five months before the shootings, according to court records filed last September in connection with the divorce.

Those records portray a woman under great stress because of a heart condition and the impending dissolution of her 17-year marriage.

Under military rules, all Cushing’s health benefits would have ended in the event of her divorce. She had expressed fear to neighbors that she might also lose her daughters in a custody dispute and had complained in court papers that her husband had been refusing to pick up expenses from one daughter’s dental work.

Cassidy said that, in addition to the depression, Cushing was suffering from psychosis and that the “psychosis dominated her entire life at this time.” She was “living in another dimension” at the time of the slayings, believing that “non-real people existed that were real to her.”

Cushing was concerned with her children’s safety and thought she was “guarding and protecting” them, “that it was necessary to protect them from a greater harm . . . that heaven was a better place than the torture and mutilation” she believed they faced from an imaginary man, Cassidy said.

Citing what he called the “unique and particular aspects of this case,” Robinson recommended to the district attorney’s office that the insanity plea be accepted. He credited his office for accepting his judgment in the case.

Robinson said it was “one of the few and rare times that all parties agreed that this is the proper result. . . . I don’t expect to see a case like this ever again.”

Cushing, he said, “really was a decent human being.”

Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan accepted the plea, saying that all of the information regarding Cushing’s condition was corroborated and explained by doctors and investigators.

Ryan also commended Robinson, saying that after reviewing the evidence submitted to him, in particular a videotaped interview with Cushing, he agreed with the prosecution’s recommendation.

Robinson said that Cushing will be transferred to a state facility, probably Atascadero or Patton, where, he said, doctors believed it would take “a very long period of confinement before they would feel comfortable with her release.”

Potentially, it will be several years after that point that another hearing would be held regarding her sanity, Robinson said.

Cassidy said that Cushing has been receiving good treatment in the Orange County Jail, that her medication had been adjusted and that there was already a marked improvement in her condition. She is also receiving medication for a heart condition.

Earlier, Cassidy had cited Cushing’s use of the widely prescribed antidepressant drug Prozac as a potential contributor to her actions. Use of the drug has been cited in about 75 civil lawsuits involving murders and suicides, and its use has been limited in Europe.

However, Cassidy said Friday that while Prozac may have had some “impact” on Cushing’s actions, he had no concrete proof of any direct relation to the shootings.