Q. Now, you’ve heard Rita talk about the kids and their personalities. Do you agree pretty much with that?
A. I do agree pretty much with her assessment of their personalities. Caleb is kind of — he likes to do his own thing. Most of his good friends are girls. He’s quirky, funny, seems kind of — he’s kind of shy sometimes and seems a little tentative, I guess. He doesn’t like to try new things. You need to try to get him to eat something new. Like, we were trying to get him to eat a cashew, my dad and I. No, It wasn’t going to happen. And so yeah, he’s got kind of a quirky personality. So — and Amanda I would say, yeah, she’s kind of quiet and reserved but again a happy kid. With Amelia or Mae, she’s — I call her just witty. She’s just kind of funny just beyond her years and witty and intelligent beyond her years, and I think a lot of that has to do with growing up with older siblings. She’s kind of — she wants to hang with them.
Q. And I don’t want to belabor it, but we’ve heard a lot of testimony about her medical conditions. Is that pretty much —
A. Yeah. Yeah, she had — well, we had hoped — she had actually started to refer to her Hirschsprung’s disease, and I think we had hoped that would take care of the bowel problem, but it didn’t. She had gallstones. She had her gallbladder removed, and that was kind of a weird find. So yeah, but the rest of her medical conditions, you know, the tethered spinal cord, it turns out her spine grows back faster than your spinal cord. So if you don’t — if it’s not loose at the end, it gets stretched, and then you get nerve damage. So that had to be taken care of. So yeah, she had just a lot of — it was kind of random lower abdominal birth defects. She has what they call a urogenital sinus because her genitalia, her uterus and her urinary tract never separated, and they start as one in vitro — I mean, in uterus, and then they separate in the tube, and hers never did. So it’s just a lot of things in her lower abdomen, but they seem to be taken care of well. The nice thing for Amanda is they’re pretty easy to hide, you know, on a social level.
Q. If I understand correctly, she has ports for each —
A. Yeah, she has a port to empty her bladder and then another port to basically empty her bowel, but not through the port through the other end, through her colon. So what they were calling the ACE is the anticolonic enema, is what the ACE stands for. You basically go into the colon at the top, as opposed to the bottom, and give the enema to push it all out instead of giving an enema from the colon up to kind of loosen it to come out.
Q. Did you — at home, were your tasks more — I’ll call them gender specific or —
A. Yeah. I mean, I would say we had a more old-fashioned because Rita wasn’t working, and we were able to make it on one income. But the testimony of my being on the computer from morning to evening is greatly exaggerated. I did work at home sometimes when a proposal was due or there was a paper due, but you know, it was kind of more Rita took care of the kids most of the time, and that was — while I worked.
I should probably mention that I did work a lot on the computer after work because of the shoe store. Doing all the accounting, payroll, mailings, etc., and building a web presence took a lot of work. After the shoe store closed and we still had a considerable amount of debt, I thought it was a good idea for an iPhone app that might sell well on the newly established App Store. This endeavor also took a lot of work, and it never paid off.
Q. Now, you indicated I think that she worked at a bed and breakfast at that point in time. Who took care of the kids when she was working?
A. I did. She worked on the weekends, and I took care of — I think it was just Caleb and maybe Amanda had just been born. I’m trying — I can’t remember the timeframe, but I took care of the kids on the weekends.
Q. From time to time, how did your relationship and what you did with the kids change?
A. Well, I mean, I think it’s a natural progression as the kids get older. You know, when Caleb was young, again, Caleb was always kind of an awkward kid, so you know, we tried getting him into soccer, but he just wasn’t really interested in it. I tried talking him into Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts, but he told me he thought he might get lost if they went hiking. He was always the kind of kid that was scared or timid. He’s very timid, but I spent a lot of time with Caleb early on. In fact, we he fell in love with video games early on because he had extremely poor fine motor skills with his hands, and we thought using the controllers would help his fine motor skills. It helped him play video games but not much else. So he and I would play video games. We played Lego Star Wars a lot together — Raider games a lot together. So that was — that kind of earlier in his childhood, and as he got older, he started wanting to do more and more stuff just on his own and with his friends, doing, you know, video games online with his cousins sometimes and with his friends around State College. So it’s just kind of as he got older he kind of transitioned into, you know, as I think it kind of does with any kid. I mean, people say at some point around age 11, 12 kids start to basically consider their friends to be who they want to spend time with, not their parents. They want to be with their friends, not their parents, and so that’s basically what happened. I’d say the same thing with Amanda. We kind of transitioned into instead of playing with her during the day — playing with her and stuff to her kind of wanting to do her own thing. Amanda has always had an interest in science projects and stuff. So we did — as Rita mentioned, we heat our house with wood, and I had a thermal camera at work. So we set up a thermal camera to see how the bricks got hot, and we built a fire, and then it takes eight hours for all of the bricks to get hot. So we took time lapse photography of the bricks, and so we made graphs about where the hottest point was and how the — basically how the whole thermal mass worked, and we made a big poster for the science fair with the graphs and pictures of the thermal imaging. And then this past summer, I was hoping before Rita took the kids to Michigan to get them into doing some robotics stuff. I actually work in the summer, the robotics summer camp for kids at Penn State. And so I got into doing some of that. Amanda seemed kind of interested in that and also interested in — I was kind of doing some stuff with electromagnets. So I was showing her how you could use a coil of wire and a magnet to kind of shoot the magnet out using electromagnets. I made a little demonstration for her class. So I went in there, and they all were kind of fascinated by electromagnetism.
Q. You said he was struggling with math. Other than apparently the fact that he lies to everybody about whether he’s done his homework or not, were you involved in helping with homework at all?
A. Yeah, I was. I wasn’t a lot. Most of the time I think Rita tried to have their homework done before I got home. I would get home usually around 6:00. Well, again, this is over the whole fourteen years?
Q. I guess let’s focus on the last three or four years.
A. So the last three or four years I’d get home around 6:00, 6:30. Typically, I would — as far as I knew, he had his homework done, and a lot of times I’d ask, and he’d say, yes, he had his homework done. Because I thought Rita was having him do it directly after school, just kind of get home, get your homework done, then you can come up and play. Because it’s easier, if you have kids, once they get playing, they don’t want to quit. So just get your homework done first. So that was — if he didn’t or he needed help, I’d try to help him. That was maybe once a week. A lot of it was maybe Rita wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do, and I would look at it and I’d say, boy, middle school has changed a lot since I was there, and I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do either. Caleb would claim he didn’t know what they were supposed to do, although he did. So claiming he didn’t know what they were supposed to do meant no one knew what they were supposed to do, and so then he didn’t.
Q. So there was some testimony about you just — from different people about you not doing anything at all with the kids or not helping care for the kids. What types of things did you do to help care for the kids as you went through?
A. Changed diapers when they were young. I actually changed diapers when Amanda was — up to Thanksgiving I changed her diaper for her, her pull-up, probably even after that because when — usually on the weekends Amanda never wants to get her ACE done. I suspect that it feels like basically it gives her stomach cramps. You basically pump a bunch of water into her upper large intestines. It probably feels like stomach cramps. And so she is typically — it’s typically a fight to get her to do it. So she would, you know, Rita would get that done.
Q. Why Rita and why not you?
A. It was just something that Rita well, because — I mean, again, Rita was home most of the time. I was at work most of the time. On the weekends, we didn’t do it. Because Amanda never wanted to have it done, so we used to just basically change her diaper. She’d have accidents throughout, but she was at home so she didn’t really care. And it was just — it’s not a hard thing to do. Basically you might take a little bit of practice to get the tube through — into the channel into the upper intestine, but it’s basically pumping soap and water in there. Gravity assisted, just pumping soapy water in to flush it out. And in fact, I had asked a number of times that maybe it would be a good idea that I know how to do this, in case something happened, but we never got around — Rita never got around to showing me how to do it, exactly how to do it. I think I probably with Amanda’s help could have in an emergency, but ACE was never an emergency.
Q. What about the other, what about the bladder?
A. Oh, with the bladder catherization? Amanda primarily did that — well, she got pretty good at doing that by herself pretty early on, and again, it’s just — it’s putting a tube in and getting a feel for, you know, is it going — they put a little valving mechanism so when the bladder gets full it doesn’t leak. So when the bladder gets full, it pinches the channel. So basically you’ve got to try to kind of make sure you work it through that valve, and sometimes it doesn’t want to go, and you kind of pull it out. So I would get involved usually when there was a problem, and you know, whether we got to say take her to the ER or try to — sometimes we’d try to maybe inject a little water in to open the valve up or kind of try to — you could put a syringe on the end of the catheter to try to suck or push water in. So, you know, those were kind of few and far between, but they were enough that Amanda was always scared of it because it was a traumatic experience for her. I’m pretty sure it hurt when her bladder got overextended and it couldn’t be emptied.
Q. Rita had testified that she encouraged you to learn how to do that; is that the case?
A. I wouldn’t say she encouraged me to learn how to do it. Like I said, later on Amanda did it herself all the time, and it was only a rare occasion she actually needed help.
Q. And on the ACE; what about that?
A. Again, that wasn’t like an urgent thing. That was something you could do — if that didn’t get done, then what happens was some social embarrassment because she may have an accident. But it wasn’t something that had to be done or she needed to go to the ER.
Q. And Rita has left the children with you for periods of time; isn’t that true?
A. Yes, certainly.
Q. I think most recently over Thanksgiving.
A. Yeah, I had them over Thanksgiving.
Q. And you were able to take care of them?
MS. TORQUATO: Your Honor, I’m going to object to her leading the witness quite a bit.
THE COURT: Sustained.
MS. KAUFFMAN: I will slow it down. I’m just trying to keep this moving.
BY MS. KAUFFMAN:
Q. Was it common for Rita to go away and leave the children with you?
A. Over the last couple of years, she was kind of taking what I kind of considered just get-away trips. One time she went — I think she said she went to Atlantic City. Another time she told me she went to visit a friend in Ohio near Toledo. Another time she told me she went to visit a friend in Maybee. Later I found out that was not true. So she went away for extended periods. She went away over Thanksgiving to hike in Tennessee with — I don’t know what they call him, a boyfriend or a friend of a friend. So she, over the last couple of years, yeah, and then prior to that, I you know, when she was at the shoe store, I’d take care of them. She had Amanda at the shoe store a lot though, but not necessarily Caleb. So that’s — you know, she left them with me quite frequently actually.
Q. What happened — could you explain what happened toward last spring when you were talking about trying to schedule the Michigan vacation.
A. So last spring I had — because everybody wants to get their — have their thesis defense and comprehensive exam and everything during the summer when they have more free time to finish, so I’m always trying to schedule these things. So I kept asking her, you know. Usually, we went to Michigan about two weeks in the summer. Only once did we really go all summer, and another time we went for probably most of the summer, but just a couple of weeks. So I would ask her — I was asking her when because I needed to figure out when to tell people I was not going to be in town, and she kept telling me, oh, toward the end of the summer. We’ll do it toward the end of the summer. And so I scheduled everything toward the beginning of the summer. So I had these huge defenses and comprehensive exams to do. So then when she sprang it on me that they were leaving at the beginning of the summer, I was very surprised.
Q. When did she spring it on you that they were leaving at the beginning of the summer?
A. The night before, she said they were leaving, and that was the night of the last day of school, which was basically a year ago today. Today is the last day of school. So about a year ago, the last day of school, that evening — I think I was actually in bed when she told me that she was going to be leaving in the morning with the kids, going to Michigan, and I wasn’t invited.
Q. Did that cause a little bit of a discussion?
A. Yeah, it caused probably the biggest argument we’ve ever had. Just because — she said — she told me why it was last minute was because her brother had just found — her brother who works for America Airlines had just found out that he had two weeks off of vacation. That seemed a little odd. Like, I don’t think American Airlines just springs two weeks vacation on you. And so I felt like I had been set up, and again, her not — telling me I wasn’t welcome to come was a first, and then as we kind of argued, the length of period that she was going to stay kept growing and growing until she basically told me that she wasn’t sure she was ever coming back.
Q. When she returned, did she start — what did she say about the living situation?
A. Well, in fact I went there to have her come back. She kept putting off coming back. She’d say, oh, maybe next week, oh, maybe next week, and so finally after about, I don’t know, maybe six weeks I went there, rented a car because we only had one car at the time. I went there to say, hey, either I’m taking the kids back or you’re coming back with me, but you know, this has got to end. So we came back, and you know, we kind of talked about — I’m not sure if we talked about separating at that point immediately, but it was kind of pretty clear that was the way things were going. So not immediately but later in the summer, and then she filed for divorce, I can’t remember, in June I guess. Well, again, it was pretty close to getting back that she filed for divorce. She told me — I remember her telling me she was thinking about it, and then I remember her telling me two days later, maybe a week later that she did and then getting the divorce papers.
Q. And what did the two of you discuss about — did you consider that she should leave, or did you consider that you would leave?
A. I guess — I don’t remember necessarily a discussion about it, but it was kind of implied that I would leave. I certainly wanted the kids to have the house. That’s where all of their things were, and I would get an apartment. It’s just kind of how things panned out. The problem at the time was everything was rented. It was the end of the summer, and around State College it was hard to find a place.
Q. Was there a financial issue, as well?
A. There was a financial issue. At the time, she didn’t have a job. So she hadn’t started working at the Waffle Shop or the school district yet. So yeah, I wasn’t sure — I had to find a cheap apartment, or we just weren’t going to be able to make it financially. We still had debt from the shoe store to pay off. We had a 15-year mortgage on our house, which was twice as much essentially as a 30-year mortgage. It was a — the mortgage on our house was large, and it was fine if I wasn’t paying for an apartment additionally. I had to add another $700 for an apartment, and then things just didn’t — weren’t adding up.
Q. So did you come up with a plan to make this happen financially?
A. Yeah, to rent a small apartment, let the kids basically stay at the house and whoever has custody — that was the plan I proposed. So the kids basically — I remember I thought it was a really clever idea. You told me it was called bird nesting, and people do that, and that we just — the kids kind of stayed at the house, and whoever had custody — I just thought that was good idea because that’s where all their stuff is and all their toys and all their belonging are at the house. So it’s having them stay there, and whoever had custody then come there, and I thought that was just kind of the optimal situation.
Q. So then you worked toward finding a place?
A. I did. Rita helped me and actually looked on Craig’s List and tried to find something as inexpensive as possible. I didn’t have a car at the time so I was kind of trying to find something close to campus. I’d always — we always got by on one car for a long time because we lived close to campus. So we finally found a place, a small efficiency apartment for 700 a month. Again, it was furnished, all the utilities were included. So that was about the best we could do around State College that would kind of fit into the budget.
Q. So let me throw you back into your mental state. What’s going on in your mental state in the last couple of years? Well, let me just kind of start and talk about your anxiety and depression issues and then how it’s changed in the last year or two.
A. Yeah. Well, again, I think the testimony to my depression issues has been greatly exaggerated. I’ve had — well, before the divorce, I had three episodes in ten — well, starting with the first episode in fall of 2001, that was the first time, and so I got on medication. I was never admitted to the hospital at that point. I got on medication, but it took quite a while to get me back to being kind of healthy again. And then as typical people who have depression do, because basically you’re taking a medication that once you feel better you’re not sure what it’s doing, then you read all the side effects, and you start thinking, oh, well, maybe I really don’t need this. I got through that episode and I don’t need it. So I kind of went off of it. So that next fall I had a relapse into another depressive episode, and that was the first time I was hospitalized, and primarily I was hospitalized because — well, I think I needed it, but we would call around everywhere and try to find a psychiatrist who could see me, and it was always two or three months out. So once you’re in the hospital, basically you get immediately assigned somebody, and that’s when I was first introduced to Dr. De Carle. So that was fall of 2002. He got me back on the same medication.
Q. And what was that medication?
A. Zoloft. And after that, I learned that I needed to take it, and I took it ever since. So in the ten years, almost eleven years since then, I had one fall where I had kind of a major depressive issue where I couldn’t work. It was enough to where I- yeah, it was effecting my job. But for the other times, I mean every other fall I may have one or two days. My depression is always a morning depression. I wake up. I feel very anxious. It’s more anxiety than depression. I feel anxious, very nervous. Everything seems overwhelming, then that leads into depression because you get depressed that you can’t do what you want to do. So it’s kind of a vicious cycle. But I’ve learned kind of over the years to not let it get into that vicious cycle. So, you know, maybe once or twice every fall I have a little bit. I wake up; I’m pretty jittery. I’m like I know I just got to — like Rita said, get doing something.
Q. So in the past year, I’m saying 2012, as — how was Rita — how were you and Rita beginning to get along? How was that going?
A. Well, like I say before she left, I mean, it was kind of a distant relationship at that point. In fact, I — well, in my opinion, I thought she was kind of being obviously a jerk to me around the house, and everything I’d do she would complain about. She’d complain about me eating her bread, complain about how I swallowed something. She complained about just everything, and I just kind of grew weary of basically anything I did she’d complain about it. So it just seemed very much things weren’t going well. I didn’t know she was having an affair at the time. Yeah , so then — but I didn’t think it was that bad. I mean, I thought it was something that we could work through. In fact, I suggested marriage counseling to her many times. She refused every time. I wanted to try to work it out I mean, I thought it was best for the kids, and I thought we still could at the time.
Q. And throughout this period, are you still seeing Dr. De Carle?
A. Yeah, I was seeing — I saw Dr. De Carle from 2002 until today, until the present time.
Q. How often do you see him or did you see him at that point?
A. It depends on, you know, when I was having issues, up to once a week; sometimes twice a week. When I was not having issues, like for those extended periods of like five years after the second issue and about five years after the third issue, once a month, once every two months, once every three months to get my refill on my prescription. So it was very infrequent when — for most of the time I saw him very rarely.
Q. And when she came back from Michigan, did your anxiety level increase?
A. Yeah. Well, I mean, when she filed for divorce, it was — I’ve been told that divorce is second to a death in the family as far as stressors go in somebody’s life. The psychiatrist and the psychologist all talk about stressors, and divorce is kind of number two on the list of stressors. So yeah, it was very — because like Rita had mentioned, we’ve known each other for 25 years. We’ve been married for 20. Our lives were completely entangled and trying to untangle them is extremely stressful.
Q. Did you have an anxiety attack at some point in the fall?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. Can you explain what happened?
A. What happened was I was in my office. I had actually gotten myself into my office, which I thought normally if I get myself into my office everything is fine because I’m just kind of doing things. I think what happened that time was I really started thinking about if Rita wasn’t there, you know. She had helped me. She had been the person to kick my butt out of bed, and it was a stressful situation knowing that she wasn’t willing to do that anymore. And it kind of deteriorated, and I started — it was just, I mean what she said, there were cuts on my wrist. I realize now being in the hospital people who have committed suicide have big scars on their wrists. I had little scratches on my wrists.
Q. Let me just stop you a minute, and these are attached as Defendant’s Exhibit C to my exhibit list. And could you tell me what that’s a picture of?
A. That’s a picture of my wrist probably three days afterwards. It was basically like a cat scratch. I scratched myself with a very, very dull X-Acto knife. The doctors referred to it as a cry for help. You’re not really trying to hurt yourself, but you’re trying to indicate that you need help. And the problem is that, especially with mental illness, it’s hard to ask for help. You don’t think — you feel like you should be able to take care of it yourself and just feel better.
Q. What exactly happened to you?
A. Well —
Q. If you remember.
A. Yeah, I do. What happened was — and Rita said my apartment was in — my office was in disarray. What happened was I finally said I have got to go out and — my door was shut. My office is in a suite of offices. I finally said I’ve got to go tell my assistant that I think I need to go to the hospital. So when I did that, I know I was extremely upset, kind of extremely uncoordinated, and so when I was trying to walk around my office, I have a swivel chair that — it’s stiff. It doesn’t swivel very easily. So I put my hand on it to steady myself, and it swiveled. Then I grabbed my bookshelf, and then it fell basically on top of me. And I grabbed one of the shelves on the bookshelf, and basically it couldn’t carry my weight. So it fell on top of me. So basically there were books just kind of strewn all about. My desk actually caught the bookshelf so it didn’t fall on me fortunately. I don’t know what Rita said about my head being — I didn’t have any — I’m sure something hit my head, a book, I don’t know, but I didn’t have any head injury.
Q. So what did you do to get out of that situation?
A. I then pulled out my cell phone and called Rita to ask her if she’d help, and she did. She came and took me to the hospital.
Q. So then you were hospitalized at that point?
A. Yeah.
Q. There was some discussion as to whether you were seeing a therapist or not; were you seeing a therapist at that time or not?
A. Not — not previous to that. During that hospital stay, I did — was assigned a therapist. So I’ve been seeing Dr. Cawley ever since that time. So I don’t know why —
Q. So you’ve been seeing Dr. Cawley since — about when was that?
A. I think that was late September, early October.
MS. TORQUATO: Of what year?
THE WITNESS: 2012.
BY MS. KAUFFMAN:
Q. And how often do you see Dr. Cawley?
A. Mostly once a week; sometimes every other week if the schedule is filled, so pretty much regular, pretty regularly.
Q. And you continue to see Dr. De Carle?
A. Yes.
Q. So I think we saw that you were mentioning that you had talked about moving out, and were you doing that, and what was your state of mind at that point in time?
A. Yeah, I had got an apartment that I could move into on January 1st. As I said, it was furnished so there was really nothing to move or to pack. I just needed to grab some clothes. I wasn’t expecting a PFA to be filed. So I figured that I could kind of come back and grab stuff as I needed it. It wasn’t like I needed to pack, I didn’t think, and I didn’t need any furniture or a bed or anything like that. But when I first went to move into that apartment, it wasn’t ready basically. They had — the people that shared the upstairs — who lived upstairs smoked continuously, and I realized I was sharing a ventilation system with them. So the apartment just reeked of smoke. I was trying to figure out with the landlord how we could deal with the situation. We finally blocked off all the vents and got a space heater because it was winter, and then it took a couple days — well, it took a couple of days to figure out what to do, and so that’s why I didn’t really move out, move out. I didn’t really realize that Rita was going to have such a problem with me not moving out for a couple days, and then once we kind of figured out how to deal with the situation, we kind of let the apartment air out. It kind of worked okay by blocking the duct work off.
Q. So the PFA was filed, and then there was a violation?
A. Correct.
Q. And what was the violation about specifically?
A. When I got out of the hospital — so the PFA was filed — I can’t remember the date. I had actually moved out and actually came back to the house to get the PFA, the emergency one I guess, and I fell apart. I just couldn’t believe, number one, that she’d accuse me of — the kids were listed as Plaintiffs, which was accusing me of abusing the kids. I couldn’t believe she was accusing me of abusing her, and I just fell apart. I called the Can help line, the Centre County Can help line and was taken to the hospital again. And so they changed my medication at the time. They changed it to Effexor, which is a different type of drug than Zoloft, and on the Effexor I wound up basically getting into a very manic state. I couldn’t sleep. In fact, I signed myself out of the hospital. I got to feeling so good in the hospital, and in hindsight, it was really stupid. If you voluntarily come in, you can voluntarily sign yourself out. I signed myself out, which was kind of — in hindsight kind of dumb because I didn’t realize I was on the other side of the scale in a manic kind of state. I was feeling so good; I thought what am I doing here. Right after I got out of the hospital, I texted Amanda. I texted her I love you on her iPod and immediately got a call from the police asking if I had done that. I said yes, and they came and — so that was the first time I think I spent a night in jail and was sentenced to six months probation.
Q. And then what happened?
A. Then once I got out of jail, again I spent about four days where I barely slept. Part of the probation was that I was supposed to continue to take medication. So I continued to take the Effexor, and I continued to basically just not sleep and get manic. And I just got — one night I got paranoid that Rita was going to try to take the kids to Michigan again, and so late at night, I drove by the house, and I didn’t see the car. At the time when I moved out — basically we have a two-car garage, but there was no space to put a car in, so the car was always in the driveway. I drove by the house, didn’t see the car there, got panicked again, then realized she had turned my cell phone off because she was the primary holder of the family plan.
I suppose I should note here that the PFA order said I could not be on McBath Street. However, there was a clear view of the house from Madison Street, which ran parallel to McBath Street. Thus, I drove down Madison Street to see if the car was there.
So my cell phone was useless. So I went to get a new cell phone, and then I panicked that she couldn’t get in touch with me because she didn’t know what my new phone number was. So I knew I wasn’t allowed to contact her. So I got the bright, but in hindsight extremely stupid idea of just texting her a period because I thought maybe that wouldn’t be considered contact but that she would figure out it was the phone number, if she called it that it was me so that if anything happened. I think — one thing that I think goes to my colleague, one of the other professors, she used to call us professional worriers, and I think I am a professional worrier. I worry about everything. I worry about her driving. So I worry, and when I was in that manic state on the Effexor, I worried that if something happened no one would know how to contact me. In hindsight, it was probably definitely a dumb thing to do, to text her, and dumb thing to do to worry about it at that time. Like I said, I hadn’t — I mean, I think I texted her. I think I saw in the police report at 4:00 a.m. I hadn’t slept in four days at that point. I couldn’t go to sleep. I was just — and that’s when Dr. De Carle and I started talking about bipolar issues.
Q. And so then you’re in jail?
A. Yeah, then I’m in jail, and then so they put me back on Zoloft in jail, which again I felt I got back to kind of a normal and — yeah, a normal state. I mean, again I was having trouble sleeping and stuff, but you can’t tell if that’s because you’re in jail or because you’re manic. After a while, it kind of got back to feeling like my normal self.
Q. And you were hospitalized again this spring; what happened?
A. Yeah. What happened that time, that was basically after I confirmed that Rita had been having an affair with this Mike guy, and again, I just broke down. I couldn’t believe — she had actually accused me of having an affair. She kept accusing me of having an affair, and I hadn’t, and she kept on and kept on. I kept telling her I had not, and then I come and find out she had with somebody in Michigan, and she was trying to move to Michigan. Again, I was at my dad’s house. She had — my dad had picked some stuff up from the house that Rita had boxed up, and the combination just pushed me over — I had been feeling really good actually up until that point, and my dad was actually considering kind of just spending more time in Everett and leaving me in State College. It just — that — I had suspected that she had been having an affair because of some text messages I saw, but I didn’t realize how long it had gone on — it had been going on, and when I found out basically how long it had been going on, I just –
Rita had boxed up a lot of stuff that I figured she didn’t want. She had had custom Christmas ornaments made each year showing our family. These were in the box. It made me extremely sad to see them and to think that Rita didn’t want them. She later told me that she did not know what to do with them and didn’t want to upset the kids by putting them on the Christmas tree, so she thought I might like to have them.
Q. Did you and Dr. De Carle change your medication? We don’t have him today.
A. Yeah. He — we kind of after maybe a month or so decided to try to treat me for bipolar, and so now I’m on Depakote.
Q. And do you have an understanding of — the word bipolar means a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people. Do you have an understanding of what this is?
A. Yeah. Well, what we think I have is bipolar type II, which is a type of bipolar where the manic phase is not that pronounced. You’re kind of up. You kind of have an elevated mood, but you’re not buzzing around like extreme mania. And it’s also characterized by many more — mostly depressive issues, mostly depression symptoms or events and pure manic events. So it’s kind of a — it’s not a whole manic depressive type thing but kind of more depression with some episodes of mania. So it gets misdiagnosed a lot because people don’t necessarily realize that — again, they don’t report the manic side of things because when you’re manic you feel good, you’re getting stuff done.
Q. So you said you were changed to Depakote, and does that take a while to take effect?
A. Yeah, it does. It’s just like any other kind of psychotic drug. It takes some time to get into your system, your brain to get adjusted to it. Most of them will say four to six weeks from going on it until seeing, you know, the full effect. So I’ve been feeling fine lately. I think it’s been working. I’ve been on it for a couple months now, and it didn’t — when I started going on it, I can’t say there was an immediate — like, I was in the hospital for six days. When I got out, I felt pretty terrible for probably a month. And again, I leaned on my dad a lot during that time, but as of about a week ago I have been feeling better and optimistic that I’ll continue to feel better.
Q. So at this point, have you considered what your plans might be in terms of moving? In other words, you’re living in this temporary space. Has something jelled in your mind as to what you might do?
A. Well, I mean if we sell the house, that would be one option. We’d have to figure out how to split any profit from that. I’d love to actually move back into the house. I’d love for the kids to grow up in that house. Rita and I both grew up in a house. I’d love for our kids to have the same benefit of just growing up in the same neighborhood and the same house. But, I mean, you know, a condo, a bigger apartment, definitely a place where I could have the kids and have them overnight and not be cramped in a small, little – I’ve been looking into things. I mean, if you get a 30-year mortgage on a condo around here — they’ve obviously been springing up like mushrooms, and I could probably swing it, but again, we have to kind of refinance some of our debt or — well, if we sell the house, pay off some of the debt and try to use some of the equity that we have in it for down payments. I remember actually Rita joked one time we could buy a condo next to each other, which in hindsight I don’t think would work out now, but it was a plan.
THE COURT: How much longer do you think?
MS. KAUFFMAN: I’m going to be probably another 15, 20 minutes, and then there’s cross-examination.
MS. TORQUATO: We could stop at cross. I can’t go too much longer after 5:30.
THE COURT: Well, and I’m not sure we need to be going — I mean, is this a good stopping place? I know it’s kind of bad to stop in the middle of direct, but it’s —
MS. KAUFFMAN: No, this is a fine stopping point.
Judge Ruest then continued the hearing until July 10, 2103. I was relieved not to have to go through the cross-examination after everything I’d heard that day. Plus, it would allow me to better prepare for the things Tonia might ask. I, unfortunately, do not have the transcript from the rest of the hearing. I don’t recall anything significant during the cross-examination besides what one might expect from Tonia, i.e., she tried to make me look as bad as possible. One thing that I do recall, however, is part of Dr. DeCarle’s telephone testimony. It went much like that of Dr. Reedy’s testimony, but when Tonia started questioning him about me taking my medication and his diagnosis, it was pretty clear from his voice that he was pissed. He had told me previously that he did not want to testify and told me afterward doing so annoyed him. I suspect he had been through this before and did not like having to defend himself during cross-examination.
After the second part of the hearing, each lawyer submitted their proposed “Finding of Fact and Conclusions of Law.” These were essentially draft orders that each side would have liked the judge to sign without modification. This requirement was a way for Judge Ruest to get the lawyers to do her job. Her final order copy-and-pasted portions from the two documents merged into a single document depending on how Judge Ruest felt. I wonder if she requested Word versions of these in addition to the hard copies submitted to the court so she could literally copy and paste. Her final opinion seemed to lift much more from Rose’s document than Tonia’s, and she denied Rita’s petition to relocate.