Teen Wants to Sever Ties With His Mother’s Killer: His Father

Patrick Holland was only 8 when he found his mother dead on her bedroom floor. Elizabeth Holland had been shot eight times and beaten so savagely with the gun that its wooden handle shattered.

The killer was Patrick’s father, Daniel Holland.

Now 14 years old, Patrick Holland is trying to cut off all ties -- legal as well as emotional -- with the man who murdered his mother.

“He is not my father anymore,” Patrick said.

Today, a Massachusetts judge is to hear Patrick’s petition to terminate his father’s parental rights. State social service officials have joined with Patrick to ask the court to end Daniel Holland’s role as a father.

Legal experts do not know of another case like this one.

A Florida teenager living with a foster family made headlines 10 years ago when he tried unsuccessfully to sever ties with his birth parents.

But the Holland case involves a child with only one living parent: a man who kept his legal status as a father despite being convicted of killing the boy’s mother. Although he is serving a life sentence in a central Massachusetts prison, Daniel Holland remains Patrick’s legal father and could try to influence his son’s life.

That is exactly what happened three years ago, when Daniel Holland asked state authorities about his son’s welfare. Months passed while Patrick’s guardians tried in vain to block his involvement.

The episode caused Patrick “some emotional havoc,” according to the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. Patrick wanted to sever his ties with his father as soon as possible. But his petition slogged through two years and five continuances before the upcoming hearing was scheduled.

“I would have done this a lot earlier if I could have,” said Patrick, who hasn’t seen his father since his mother died.

Patrick Holland’s case stands out, according to USC law professor Tom Lyon, because “it is very unusual for a child to take this kind of action.”

Lyon, an expert on family law, said courts occasionally terminate parental rights when a mother or father was killed by a spouse or lover. But these cases generally involve younger children, he said, and the action typically is brought by a social service agency on behalf of the child.

Many of the three or more women who are killed each day in this country by husbands or boyfriends leave children behind. When these men are imprisoned, they often fail to express interest in their children, Lyon said, causing “de facto termination of parental rights. The father is out of the child’s life.”

Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, also a family law specialist, said some imprisoned fathers, however, “suddenly get very parental,” believing that cleaning up their images may get them of prison.

“It makes them look like they have been rehabilitated,” she said.

What’s really unusual in this case, she said, “is for a kid to get standing to do anything. Normally, kids are considered not to have rights. I think what is really outrageous is that in this case there is no system in place to terminate parental rights.”

Elizabeth McCrocklin and Daniel Holland met in Virginia in 1988. They married within months, and Patrick was born in December 1989. The family settled in Quincy, Mass., just south of Boston.

From the start, the union was troubled. On a website dedicated to his mother (www.lizhollandmemorial.com), Patrick writes that his father once locked him in a closet “for hours, with no food, water or bathroom,” ignoring the boy’s screams to be let out. Patrick said his father repeatedly abused him and his mother.

“My father would beat her all the time,” Patrick recalls.

After nine years, Elizabeth Holland moved out with her son and started divorce proceedings. She also obtained a restraining order against Daniel Holland. As part of that order, Holland was not allowed to possess any weapons.

That order was in effect the night of Oct. 13, 1998. On the website, Patrick writes of “one of those dreams that started off like any other 8-year-old’s dream, but this one started to get terrifying. The experts say that I woke up to the sound of the gunshots ... [but] I don’t remember anything except the long and complicated dream.”

Daniel Holland broke into his wife’s house in Quincy by throwing a bag of golf clubs through the living room window. He confronted Elizabeth, and when she fled to her bedroom and locked the door, he kicked it down.

Patrick found his mother clutching a pillow in a futile attempt to ward off eight bullets from Daniel’s .22-caliber rifle. The child ran screaming into the street.

Daniel Holland, 42, was convicted of murder in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison, with 40 to 60 years tacked on for armed home invasion. His Massachusetts attorney did not return several calls to her office for comment.

To escape her husband’s abuse, Elizabeth Holland often took Patrick to stay with her best friends in this small town in southern New Hampshire. She loved the big, rambling Victorian home that Ron and Rita Lazisky lived in, and she welcomed the couple’s comfort.

“It was her safe house,” Ron Lazisky said.

A lawyer who knew the Laziskys urged them to file for custody of Patrick because Elizabeth Holland did not leave a will and failed to designate a guardian. The Laziskys successfully battled Patrick’s maternal grandfather in Virginia for custody.

“We didn’t think we’d stand a chance up here in New Hampshire,” said Ron Lazisky, a 52-year-old chemical engineer. “But it was Patrick who wanted to be here.”

So just as the Laziskys were sending the youngest of their four children off to college, Patrick filled their house with the noisy joy of a child at play.

Using the baseball skills his mother had taught him, Patrick became a catcher for the Sandown Little League. Elizabeth had taught her son to ride a bike too, and Patrick pedaled happily around this town of 6,000. He made friends at school.

He continues regular sessions with a psychotherapist. At home, Patrick refers to his guardians as Ron and Rita. But at school or with friends he calls them his dad and mom.

He said he wanted nothing to do with Daniel Holland, and was furious when his father contacted the Department of Social Services from prison in Shirley, Mass., asking to see his son’s report cards. Daniel also wanted to know how Patrick was doing in psychotherapy. And he asked about the boy’s baseball.

“He comes out of nowhere, and thinks he has the right to know those things, the right to be my father,” Patrick said. “He lost that right six years ago when he killed my mother.”

Ron Lazisky at first refused to provide the information. When the agency told him to comply, he wrote a terse letter.

“Patrick is doing great in school, wonderful in baseball and awesome in his counseling,” Lazisky reported.

Lawyers for Patrick and the Laziskys, as well as the family court judge, would not discuss the case. But Denise Monteiro, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, said her agency supported Patrick’s effort to end his legal relationship with his father.

“He has stated in no uncertain terms what he wanted, and we agree that this is in his best interest,” Monteiro said, adding that her agency has filed its own petition with the court on behalf of Patrick.

Attorney Edward Fleming of Quincy, who was representing Elizabeth Holland in her effort to divorce Patrick’s father, said: “She wanted to terminate the relationship with Daniel Holland, and in a way, Patrick is just following through with this. This is highly unusual, for a minor to institute this action. But I think this precedent would be an honor to Elizabeth.”

Patrick said he thought every day about his mother, a woman who laughed easily and loved to help others. He said he hoped what he was doing would end up helping others, the way his mother did.

Most of all, said Patrick, “I think she would want this.”