Blade, The (Toledo, OH)



Blade, The (Toledo, OH)

December 13, 1998 | | |

MINDY BERENYI, 16 WHEN SHE KILLED HER DAD, PUTS UP A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM HOPES OF DEFENSE REST ON TEEN'S ABUSE CLAIM

Author: JENNIFER FEEHAN BLADE STAFF WRITER

Dateline: ANTWERP, O.

Mindy Berenyi said she never set out to kill her father when she came home from school on a fall day in 1995.

The 16-year-old former cheerleader was thinking of killing herself, she said, as she sat alone in a bathroom with her father's loaded 12-gauge shotgun.

But she snapped when her father, William Berenyi, walked in the house. Without warning, Mindy left the bathroom and shot him in the back.

More than three years later, Mindy is going to trial in Paulding County Common Pleas Court, where she hopes to convince a jury that she was justified in killing her father because she was abused.

Mindy contends that years of verbal and physical abuse led to the killing. Authorities say her allegations are unfounded.

In an interview from the Van Wert County jail, Mindy apologized for the slaying. But she also said she wants people to know that she was in terrible pain.

``The worst that they have ever felt in their entire life, the worst thing that anyone could ever say to them, the most pain their heart has ever felt and amplify that tenfold, and that is how he made me feel everyday,'' she said, her voice cracking. ``I don't think that makes it right what I did, but I don't think I should have to pay for the rest of my life.''

Mindy's case didn't go to trial in 1996.

In an agreement with the prosecutor, she pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of murder and began serving a 15-year-to-life sentence. Paulding County Prosecutor Joseph Burkard and members of Mr. Berenyi's family said they were satisfied that she had taken responsibility for the killing and that she would be in prison at least until she was 26 - her first opportunity for parole.

Her conviction was overturned in 1997 by the Third District Court of Appeals in Lima on a technicality: Mindy never received a physical examination before she was certified to stand trial as an adult.

Mindy, now 19, received that exam this summer and was later recertified to stand trial as an adult. She was reindicted by a Paulding County grand jury for aggravated murder with a gun specification, and she now faces, if convicted, 33 years to life in prison.

Her attorney, Larry DiLabbio of Toledo, plans to use battered woman syndrome as the basis for self-defense in the aggravated murder trial next month. While Mr. DiLabbio considered the idea of such a defense two years ago, an expert on the subject concluded Mindy did not fit the profile of a battered woman.

Mr. DiLabbio says Mindy withheld information the first time around. She didn't tell the court her father had inappropriate sexual contact with her when she was a young child, didn't say he struck her, choked her, threatened and degraded her, didn't tell that he kept loaded guns in the house and once goaded her to kill him.

Members of her father's family do not believe the allegations. They have not spoken with Mindy since the killing.

``I can tell you for our family that we support my brother 100 per cent, and we're hoping that we see justice done,'' said Becky Geyer of Antwerp, Mr. Berenyi's sister. ``... People know what he was trying to do to help her. He did everything he could.''

WILLIAM BERENYI - who everyone knew as Andy - and his first wife, Shirley, divorced when Mindy was 3. Shirley said their 15-year marriage was ``not good at all.'' Mr. Berenyi, a tool and die maker at Uniroyal Goodrich, had a violent temper with her and their two older sons, but the same was not true with Mindy, she said.

When Mindy went to live with her dad full time at age 7, Mrs. Berenyi said she was not worried he would mistreat her. He never had before.

Mindy said in an interview with The Blade that she had a happy childhood until she turned 11. She said her father had always made her stay in bed with him and massage him - something she accepted as normal. One night, though, she said he climbed in her bed and she pretended she was asleep, then slept on the floor. She said from then on, things were different.

She said he would scream at her for no reason, restrict her from doing things, tell her she was worthless. She said that when she was 14 or 15 he got increasingly violent with her - pulling hair, choking her, slamming her head against the wall.

She said such behavior rarely occurred in public. She recalled just one time when he screamed at her at a friend's party.

Mindy insists her stepmother, Joni Berenyi, who married her father when Mindy was 12, and other family members knew of the maltreatment. But in interviews with investigators and media, they said Mr. Berenyi was not abusive but was simply trying to get his unruly daughter under control.

Joni Berenyi declined interviews with The Blade.

Mindy went to live with her mother in Indianapolis in October, 1994, but the move was short-lived. Over Thanksgiving, Mindy's friends came into the house and stole things after Mindy had given them her house keys. Over Christmas break, someone threw a brick through Mrs. Berenyi's living room window.

She said her ex-husband had told her that Mindy lied, disobeyed, and ran with a bad crowd, and she began to believe him. She packed her daughter's things and sent her back to Antwerp.

A few days later, Mindy took her dad's car and tried to run away. The car broke down before she got too far, but a week later, she drove to Indianapolis and stayed with friends for four days before calling her mother. The family agreed to admit Mindy to Charter Beacon Hospital in Fort Wayne.

She was there nine days when her father took her home. Mindy said he would not agree to counseling and would not allow her to take the anti-depressant prescribed for her at Charter.

Problems at school escalated about the same time.

David Bagley, superintendent at the 840-student Antwerp Local Schools, said Mindy had been a cheerleader, a decent student, a typical teenager. After she returned from Indianapolis, school officials noticed a big change in Mindy. Her grades fell, attendance dropped, her attitude changed.

But whenever the high school principal called Mr. Berenyi about Mindy, he always responded right away and was cooperative, Mr. Bagley said.

``I think he did the normal disciplinary things a parent does,'' Mr. Bagley said. ``We assume she probably thought that was too much.''

Mindy's friend and neighbor Nate Connin said Mindy's father was strict, and her friends rarely came over when he was home.

``I think one of the things that stands out the most was we could always stay out later than she could, and she couldn't understand why,'' he said.

Mindy, who was a year behind him in school, liked to have a good time, Mr. Connin said. She dragged him to his junior prom because she wanted to go, he said. In the year before her father's killing, Mindy started smoking marijuana and drinking. When that happened, Mr. Connin said, she let her grades go.

``It opened up a different lifestyle for her,'' he said.

In July, 1995, Mindy tried to run away again. This time, her father caught her not far from their house. He called the sheriff's department, and a deputy who came to the house later contacted the Paulding County Department of Human Services because he felt ``something more was going on but he wasn't sure as to what it was,'' according to a caseworker's notes.

Mindy and her family began meeting with the caseworker, but the problems at home never had a chance to improve. Two months later, William Berenyi was dead.

BATTERED CHILD syndrome is recognized as a defense for murder in six states, but not Ohio. But evidence and expert testimony regarding a history of abuse has been permitted in parricide cases in nearly 40 states, said Paul Mones, a Portland, Ore., lawyer who pioneered the battered child syndrome defense in the early 1980s.

Numerous courts in Ohio have accepted such testimony, he said, and in June the Ohio Supreme Court granted a new trial to a teenager who had killed his mother by shooting five arrows into her head because a judge in Jefferson County had not allowed testimony about battered child syndrome at his trial.

Rather than battered child syndrome, Mr. DiLabbio said he is using battered woman syndrome in Mindy's case because it's a recognized legal defense in Ohio.

Mr. Mones was not familiar with the Berenyi case and would not comment on it, but he has worked on more than 250 cases in which children have killed their parents.

``The big problem with these cases is that in the average homicide case, most of the evidence concerns the day of the homicide or maybe the day before the homicide,'' he said. ``But in these kinds of cases what happened the day of the homicide is not as relevant as what happened in the 10 years prior to the homicide.''

Mr. Mones said he does not advocate one punishment for battered children who kill. But he said in most cases, the child is in dire need of treatment. In most cases, they are not bad children. Most have attempted suicide.

``When kids get convicted, they don't get treatment, and treatment is the No. 1 thing for these kids. They have the best chances for rehabilitation,'' Mr. Mones said.

SEPT. 27, 1995, began as any other at the Berenyi house, a neat ranch on a winding road a few miles west of Antwerp.

Mindy said she recalls nothing out of the ordinary. She and her father argued ``same as always,'' she said. ``I don't really remember what it was about.''

After school, she went to a friend's house, then called her friend Nate to give her a ride home. She remembers telling him she wanted to die, wanted to kill herself, ``but I said that so much it was almost a joke.''

Adding to her anxiety, she said, was the fact that she suspected she was pregnant by a boyfriend, and she feared telling her father.

When she got home, she noticed an ashtray sitting on her desk. She said her father routinely searched her room and laid things out just to let her know he had been there.

``I just got scared, even more scared because he said that morning that if he caught me smoking again it would be the last time,'' Mindy said.

She broke the lock on his bedroom door, retrieved a shotgun, and went into the bathroom. She said she doesn't know how long she was there, but when she heard her father come home, panic set in.

``I knew if he caught me with that gun, he would either beat me very badly with it or kill me with it,'' Mindy said.

She yelled to her dad that there was a message on the answering machine, and when she stepped out of the bathroom, she fired a shot. It struck him in the upper left part of his back, severing his aorta.

After the shooting, she went into her father's room, took a .357 Magnum from his gun collection, and sat down. Nearly two hours passed before Mindy's stepmother arrived home. Amid threats of suicide, Joni Berenyi persuaded Mindy to put down the gun she was holding.

They talked, smoked, hid in the bathroom when Mindy's grandmother knocked at the door, then left in the car, driving around for two hours before going to the sheriff's department in Paulding.

There, Mindy confessed to the killing.

She awoke the next morning at the Wood County Juvenile Detention Center. Records show she was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage in the detention center in December, 1995.

With a cash bond of $750,000, she has been behind bars ever since.

THE SHOCK has passed, but there is little sympathy for Mindy in her hometown, a farming community just east of the Ohio-Indiana line. Locals say her father was a likable guy, a little loud at times, but a hard-worker who provided for his family and enjoyed life. He sometimes let Mindy fire his guns along the Maumee River, just beyond their backyard.

``He was a well-known guy here, a longtime resident, and he got along with people in town,'' Mr. Bagley, longtime schools superintendent, said.

Mr. DiLabbio knows a new trial with a psychological defense is a gamble. He must convince a jury Mindy was in fear for her life from years of abuse. But Mr. Berenyi was never charged with abusing Mindy, and authorities said there was no evidence of physical abuse.

``The most difficult part is going to be to take a person who in the eyes of the majority of the people in that city, in that area, was a decent person, was a dad that was just trying to enforce some rules, some strict behavior, and try to take that situation and show people what actually happened inside that house to the family members who lived under his roof,'' he said.

Mr. Burkard, the Paulding County prosecutor, did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. Sheriff David Harrow also declined to comment.

Mindy claimed she didn't talk about her father's abusive behavior before because she did not want to alienate her family.

``The first time my mom came to visit me at the detention center after this happened, she said: `Your brothers are afraid you're going to tell people your dad molested you. You're not going to do that right, honey?' And I just looked at her and I said, `No, Mom, I'm not,'

``I didn't think. I didn't. After that, I thought my family is going to hate me if I tell them what he did, so I just kept it to a minimum. I said, `Well, he yelled at me sometimes.'''

Now, she said, she has little to lose.

``The first time I had these loyalties to my family who don't even acknowledge me,'' Mindy said softly. ``I still have a hard time with this because I want them to love me.''

Caption:

Mindy Berenyi, in a jailhouse portrait this year, says, `I don't think I should have to pay for the rest of my life.' Mindy Berenyi is 11 in this family snapshot - the age, she says, when the abuse started. William `Andy' Berenyi had custody of his daughter for most of her childhood after Mindy Berenyi's parents divorced when she was 3 years old. At left is 6-year-old Mindy Berenyi with her father in June, 1985. Above, 8-month-old Mindy and her father pose for a picture in front of Mindy's first Christmas tree. Mindy is using a battered woman syndrome defense against charges she murdered her father. Ohio does not allow battered child syndrome as a defense.

Copyright (c) 1998 The Toledo Blade Company

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download