The trial of Philip Chism for the rape and murder of math teacher Colleen Ritzer has finally started today, yet it’s already revealed the deadly teen’s “unspeakable” and “terrible” state of mind.
A lawyer for the now-16-year-old defendant began opening arguments by conceding that her client had not only come to school that day with the intent to harm the 24-year-old woman, but with a murderer’s tool kit hidden inside his backpack.
Chism, the defense attorney stated, had been “driven” to such an awful purpose because the black youth had inherited a debilitating “psychosis” that first manifested itself when he was only 10 years of age.
On October 22, 2013, he was just 14 when he followed his unsuspecting victim into a school bathroom armed with a box cutter and wearing rubber gloves and a ski mask; viciously attacking her there in a premeditated sexual homicide that lasted “eleven minutes.”
He then stuffed Colleen Ritzer’s lifeless body in a garbage bin and wheeled the container to an adjacent wooded area, where he assaulted her again with a foreign object and obscenely posed her corpse.
Using school surveillance tapes, police identified her rapist and killer within hours of his leaving the crime scene, arresting the towering teenager later that evening, but not before he’d used the slain teacher’s bank cards to reward himself with dinner and a movie.
Philip Chism is being tried as an adult for the uncommonly cruel crime he confessed to committing in a courtroom today. He also faces separate criminal charges for similarly attempting to assault a female corrections guard while jailed and awaiting November’s trial.
This means, despite the insanity defense his legal team is offering the jury now -- or that prosecutors can’t pursue the death penalty because he’s *merely* a juvenile -- Chism may very well end up incarcerated for the rest of his life.
