Playground Killer Was Ill, Jury Is Told

A man convicted last week of intentionally killing two children and injuring five others on a Costa Mesa playground had struggled for years with mental illness, his attorney told jurors Monday.

At the start of a sentencing hearing to determine if Steven Allen Abrams should be found not guilty because of insanity, Deputy Public Defender Denise Gragg said Abrams was diagnosed with psychotic delusions six years ago, and was never able to control thoughts that someone was tampering with his mind.

“Schizophrenia is a physical problem with the brain. It’s not something that can be willed away,” Gragg told the jury in Orange County Superior Court.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Debora Lloyd retorted in her opening statement that Abrams’ mind was damaged only by years of drug abuse.

During interviews with psychiatrists after he drove through the playground in May 1999, Abrams, 40, admitted abusing cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and other drugs most of his life.

“This defendant has used so many drugs during his life . . . that it’s no wonder his brain has malfunctioned,” Lloyd said.

If found insane, Abrams would be sentenced to a state psychiatric hospital and held until doctors conclude that he is safe for release, if ever. If he’s not found insane, another hearing would be held to determine whether he should be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole.

The sanity hearing could last a month, more than twice as long as the trial that led to his conviction.

The children were killed or injured when Abrams drove his Cadillac through a chain-link fence and onto a busy playground at the Southcoast Early Childhood Learning Center. He later told psychiatrists that he attacked the children because they were innocent and such an attack might silence the “brain wave police” who were instructing him to kill.

The delusions Abrams described were the byproduct of schizophrenia, Gragg said. The illness, which the lawyer said is hereditary, ran through his mother’s family, the lawyer said. Abrams’ maternal aunt spent most of her life at a psychiatric hospital in Italy after being diagnosed with the illness, Gragg said.

Schizophrenia sometimes is not seen until adulthood, the lawyer said. With Abrams, the first signs came about 1994, when he was 34, she said.

Abrams would dress in combat boots and military fatigues, then patrol the streets around his neighborhood looking for the people he said were beaming signals into his brain. On another occasion he was seen standing on a corner with his arms out, a table before him covered with water glasses and a sign saying “Holy Water.”

“He began to have the belief that maybe he was the Messiah,” Gragg said.

Drugs, his lawyer said, have nothing to do with his illness.

“He is still to this day telling us about the brain wave people,” she said. “The odds are great that for the rest of his life he will remain ill.”