Neurologist: Mesac Damas brain abnormalities consistent with schizophrenia

Several abnormalities in Mesac Damas’ brain are consistent with schizophrenia, a mental illness marked by a disconnection from reality, a Naples neurologist testified Monday.

Damas, 41, who pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder last month, was in court for a Spencer hearing, an opportunity for prosecutors and defense lawyers to present additional evidence before his sentencing Friday.

Collier Circuit Judge Christine Greider could sentence Damas to death for killing his wife and five young children in September 2009. Damas waived his right to a jury.

Damas’ court-appointed lawyers, James Ermacora and Kevin Shirley, are trying to keep their client off death row by presenting evidence that he is mentally ill and was raised in a violent and paranoid culture in Haiti by a family marked by religious tension.

“An individual’s mental health or lack of mental health is relevant with regards to sentencing,” Shirley said after the hearing. “If we have people who are mentally ill, we would like to think we don’t sentence them to death.”

Dr. Mark Rubino, a Naples-based neurologist, was one of two witnesses called by the defense Monday. In the courtroom, he analyzed MRI and positron emission tomography scan images of Damas’ brain taken in 2014, showing several abnormalities, including enlarged ventricles and atrophied temporal lobes.

Rubino called schizophrenia “a total misread of reality” and said it could lead to “impairment of judgment, planning, decision making, understanding the difference of right or wrong.”

Assistant State Attorney Rich Montecalvo attempted to poke holes in Rubino’s testimony, noting his qualifications as a neurologist rather than a neuro-psychologist, questioning the accuracy of the brain scans and pointing out that previous doctors who examined Damas found “no evidence of major mental illness.”

The defense also called Eilzabeth McAlister, a Wesleyan University professor and specialist in Afro-Caribbean religions. McAlister testified about Haiti’s violent and paranoid culture when Damas was a child and the mixing of Evangelical Christianity and Voodoo in his household.

McAlister and Rubino discussed conversations with Damas, during which he spoke of “black magic” and being under “demonic attack” at the time of the killings.

“Part of your belief, or I guess Mr. Damas’ belief that he relayed to you, is quite simply that the devil made him do it, correct?” Assistant State Attorney Dave Scuderi asked of McAlister.

She called the phrase trite and simplistic but gave a reluctant yes.

Prosecutors spent most of the morning attempting to prove the killings were cold, calculated, heinous and atrocious. Their first witness, Assistant Collier County Medical Examiner Manfred Borges, reviewed crime scene photos, testifying that many of the victims’ injuries were defensive — meaning they tried to fight Damas, who was armed with a filet knife he’d purchased at Walmart — and that Damas had to pass the blade across his victims’ necks several times to kill them.

“The scene to me indicated a struggle,” Borges said of one of the children’s bedrooms.

Jessica Gerster, a Collier County Sheriff’s Office crime scene investigator, showed the court the knife, found in a bedroom dresser, its blade bent, apparently during the attack.

But the emotional centerpiece of the hearing occurred before lunch, when Mackindy Dieu — the brother of Guerline Dieu Damas and the uncle to her five children — took the stand to give a victim’s impact statement. Many members of the Dieu family gathered in the courtoom Monday.

He described Guerline Dieu Damas as a doting mother and hardworking Publix employee whose “smile could light up the room.”

Her son Michzach, 9, wanted to play football. Her younger sons Marven, 6, and Maven, 5, wanted to be wrestlers when they grew up. Her daughters Megan, 3, and Morgan, 1, “were so young that their opportunities were limitless. They could have changed the world. They could have been anything they wanted to,” he said.

“I don’t want my sister’s legacy to be a domestic violence statistic,” he said, dressed in a black suit and reading from a prepared text. “I want people to know who she was to me and my family and what she could have been to this community.”

He recalled that day Sept. 18, 2009, when his sister didn’t show up for work. He recalled the rainy afternoon the next day when a Collier deputy gained access to the Damas home and then walked back out.

“I could see the look of fear on his face,” Dieu recalled. “He looked at my sister Netty and I and said, ‘I’m sorry to inform you that your sister and her children are deceased.’ “

Dieu said he was “left an empty shell of a man standing in my sister’s driveway in the rain.”

Every day he lives with the image of his sister, nieces and nephews being lowered into the ground in white caskets, he said, their voices silenced too soon.

“They will never graduate. They will never go to prom. They will never drive a car, get married or become mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles,” Dieu said.

“What should have been a legacy of our family has been destroyed. An entire generation is gone.”

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will present closing arguments Tuesday.