July 19, 2009: Dr. William Petit, two years later

[Record-Journal]

By Jesse Buchanan, Record-Journal staff

There are few plants in the gardens of Dr. William A. Petit's Plainville home that don't have sentimental value. The snapdragons were his daughter Michaela's favorite, the lace cap hydrangeas were one of his wife's favorites and many of the trees and bushes were transplanted from his previous house.

From the back room of Petit's home you can make out the heart-shaped design of the biggest garden, directly behind the house. It's the most quiet, William Petit said, and will become even more so when trees and bushes fill out to form a barrier from the street traffic.

It's been nearly two years since Petit was attacked in his home and his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and daughters Haley, 17, and Michaela, 11, were killed. The house, damaged by a fire started during the attack, was torn down in 2008.

William Petit now lives with his parents, William Sr. and Barbara Petit. They moved to the home in 1991 and often hosted their son and his family for visits. The heights Hayley and Michaela reached as they grew over the years are marked on a door frame.

William Petit has given up his practice as an endocrinologist at the Hospital of Central Connecticut in New Britain and has poured most of his time and energy into the Petit Family Foundation. He's not sure whether he'll ever return to his practice, with the foundation taking up most of his days.

Petit received frequent phone calls late last week, most of them questions about today's GE 5K Road Race, which benefits the foundation that was incorporated in 2007. While in the hospital recovering from injuries received during the attack, he was asking friends to get involved in creating scholarships in the names of his wife and daughters.

The foundation provides grants as well as scholarships and focuses on causes his daughters and wife were interested in: cures for chronic illnesses, young women's education and support for victims of violence.

Petit sat down for an interview with the Record-Journal on Thursday.

You're a pretty avid gardener. Is the memorial garden what you were hoping for for your Cheshire property?

In the beginning I wasn't sure. Basically what happened was after the first anniversary people kept on saying, "What are you going to do, what are you going to do?" I don't know, what are you supposed to do? And then finally I said one day, well, maybe I'll do this - I'll buy 50 plants at one of the shops I usually do business with and leave them at the property. I'll tell people if they want to do something, if they want to come by and think and sit or whatever, they can come by and plant a plant. Sort of the guy approach: random, not a lot of planning. So that's what I wanted to do. A couple of the neighbors who were good friends of Jenn's all of a sudden started talking to people and talking to some of the suppliers. It sort of took on a life of its own. All of a sudden there're 50 people over there working and digging and putting in topsoil and trellises and statuary and perennials and annuals ... It's turned out very nice.
Have you seen pictures? Have you been out there?

Yes, lots of pictures. I actually have not been back to the property. It's sort of a struggle with that. I'm stuck with the pictures, Christine (Gilleylen) and Kim's (Ferraiolo) pictures, two ladies from the church.

Do you still attend the Methodist church in Cheshire?

Yes.

How has that been, staying with the same congregation, through the process in the past two years?

It's good and bad. It's good because it's familiar and everybody's supportive and everybody knows and everybody's very caring all the time ... It's bad, well, bad is not really the correct term. It's difficult because that's where the girls grew up. We moved to Cheshire in '89, joined the church in '89. Hayley was born in October of '89, she got baptized there, she was in child care there. She spent her whole 17 years in that church. Michaela, same thing, 1995. As a church we're maybe 150 members who are there all the time, so a lot of the people there helped to do day care for them and Sunday School and vacation Bible school and all the projects that go on throughout the years.

It's a small group, it's a small church. The difficult part is that there's all the memories and all the kids that were their friends and you see them growing up now and you think about your kids sort of stuck at the same age. It's a strange concept, that your kids will never be older than 11 and 17. That makes it difficult. There are memories, they're good memories, but it's sort of a reminder.

Do you do anything for the anniversary of the attacks on July 23?

There's going to be a Mass here in town (Plainville) at Our Lady of Mercy, the church that I grew up in and that my parents belong to, on Thursday morning at eight. I don't know if the Methodist church (in Cheshire) is doing something this year. They had an open-door meditation time last year. It's pretty low key: go to church, come home. That's about it. Go to the cemetery, things like that. Jenn's mom and her sister are coming in this Saturday for the (GE 5K Road) race; they're probably staying for a little bit.

How much have you been kept in the loop with the judicial side of things? You've expressed frustration with how long the process is taking.

Mr. (Michael) Dearington, the district attorney, will talk to me whenever I want, so I have good communication with him. I stop down and talk to him every couple of weeks.
Do they give you any sense of when there's going to be a trial?

They're talking about starting jury selection in January of 2010.

That's the closest step?

There's going to be a hearing on Tuesday, there're hearings every three or four weeks, but they're in chambers so they're not public, but Tuesday's going to be a public hearing.

I imagine it feels like it's dragging on.

Yeah. Two years, not much has happened.

How do you feel about being in some ways the face of legislation such as the three-strikes law and the fight to keep the death penalty?

A lot of people make comments and they really don't understand what victims go through. And I don't know if there's any way they can understand. There's Article 29 in the (Connecticut) Constitution that enumerates certain victims' rights, but there's no teeth in the law. They can sort of violate most of those rights and you really have no recourse. And most of that has to do with the motions we've filed with the Office of Victim Advocate on Tuesday saying you're going slow and there's really no reason for it, you need to get moving and you re-victimize the victims when you let things drag.

Are you in touch with other people in a similar situation? Is there any group to advocate for these things, or just for support?

I certainly get lots of support in the mail, in person and on the Internet. We haven't formed a group per se, other than we signed on to campaign for the three-strikes petition since we don't have a true three-strikes law in the state. People think we do, based on changes to the persistent felon law, but it's not a three-strikes law. You can still get to your third violent felony and get a pretty short sentence because they changed the range of sentences for some violent felonies. On your third violent felony, the judge has the ability to triple the penalty. If you get two years, then it ends up getting six, which often doesn't seem adequate if you've committed rape or arson or murder or felonious assault and rape and something else. When the legislature asked the Office of Fiscal Analysis to study it, and the average sentence meted out by the judges in this state on the third round of felony was 7.9 years, it's not a real short time, but if someone's had a felonious assault and committed a rape and has now been caught for the third time, I suspect it seems like a very short time to the victims. And I don't know what the first two victims think, that the person was out and did it to someone else and was out and did it to a third victim. It's easy to get very exasperated when they couch it in monetary terms, that somehow they put a value on it. Trying to put a money value on it is very insulting. It's not that you ignore the money, but if we have a government that can't help protect the people, what would be their primary role?

Do you see it as part of your role to use your platform to help make these changes?

I will assert myself when I think that very important decisions are being made. I thought it was very poor form for the legislature to consider banning the death penalty while Rome is burning, so to speak. An 8 or 9 million dollar deficit and they're worrying about that for five and a half or six and a half months, but we're going to monkey around with the death penalty, in addition to the fact that I think it' s wrong to outlaw it. We're obviously at opposite ends of the spectrum with a lot of people, but 65, 70 percent of the people in the state of Connecticut, per the Quinnipiac polls, agree with me, depending on how you ask the question. I think 80, 85 percent were for it when asked about our case and when asked about Michael Ross' case. They can ask the question in kind of a squirrely way and bring those numbers down a little bit, which has been done. The opponents usually put out the low number. But when they ask about particularly heinous crimes, it really goes into three-quarters in favor.

Has there been criticism of your position and have people really come out against you over this? How has that been received?

They're mostly polite. My feeling is that most of the people who oppose me have been polite but dismissive. They treat me as if I can't have reasonable judgment because I'm grieving, which is kind of insulting. It's not kind of insulting, it is insulting.