Metro

Juror speaks out as Conn. family’s killer gets death penalty

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NEW HAVEN, Conn. — It’s trash removal on a global scale, jurors said yesterday of their vote to put home-invasion monster Steven Hayes to death.

“The earth will be a better place if Hayes is removed from it,” said juror Herbert Gram, of Madison, Conn., speaking of the murderer of a Connecticut nurse and her two daughters.

“I’m not a particularly religious person, but Satan comes to mind” when it comes to the heinous killer, he said.

Gram was one of 12 jurors who recommended yesterday that Hayes be sent to the death chamber for raping and strangling beloved nurse Jennifer Hawke-Petit and for helping to burn her daughters — Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11 — alive in their beds during the horrific 2007 break-in robbery in the wealthy suburb of Cheshire 14 miles north of New Haven.

Gram, a retired scientist, said that after the verdict, the exhausted and emotional jurors met with the sole survivor of the senseless attack — Dr. William Petit, Jennifer’s husband and the girls’ father — in the courthouse.

“I’m 77, and I haven’t cried in a long, long time. But seeing this man, what he went through — just close your eyes and imagine you’re a dad and you come home and your wife and daughters are gone. How would you respond?” Gram told The Post from his home last night.

“It is just so horrific. It doesn’t fit any caliber or ruler. There is no dimension you can put to it.

“This is the condition where the death penalty was meant to be applied. The crime was so heinous, and there was so little remorse shown on the part of the defendant. He sat there with such a blank look,” the juror said.

“The guy continued to stare straight ahead like he was watching a movie. There was just nothing.”

Gram said the jury took more than three days to decide if Hayes should be executed because, “There wasn’t anybody who was adamantly against the death penalty — but when you begin talking about the death penalty, it’s sure as hell not a light decision.”

One female juror openly wept as the judge asked her whether she agreed with the verdict during an individual polling of each member and she hoarsely responded, “Yes.”

But a male juror loudly replied, “Yes” when it came to his turn — and stared directly at Hayes.

Juror Diane Keim, 59, a special-education teacher from Madison, Conn., said the panel kept a photo of the smiling, beautiful girls in front of them as they deliberated.

“We had a picture of the girls — and it was always in front of us,” Keim said. “It just reminded us that we had to do the right thing for the family.

“When I looked at the photos of the girls, I wanted to hug these girls, and I wanted to hug Dr. Petit and try to take away his pain. Then I had to put that aside and make my decision according to the law.”

When the jury’s verdict was read aloud, Hayes broke into a smile at the defense table — because, his lawyer said, he’s eager to commit “suicide by state.”

The same death verdict brought sobs — of bittersweet relief — to Dr. Petit.

The doctor, a noted endocrinologist, was beaten nearly to death with a baseball bat in the attack by Hayes and his partner in crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky, who is to stand trial next year.

Petit later explained his courtroom tears to reporters.

“I was really crying for loss,” Petit said.

“Michaela was an 11-year-old little girl,” he said, his voice breaking. “Tortured and killed in her own bedroom. Surrounded by stuffed animals. Hayley had a great future. She was a strong and courageous person. And Jennifer helped so many kids.

“So I was really thinking of the tremendous loss. It’s a huge void in my life, and our family and friends’ lives.

“I was glad for the girls that there was justice. Because I think it was a just verdict. But mostly, I was sad for the loss that we have all suffered.”

Still, he said, anyone who thinks that he now has “closure” is “an imbecile.”

“There’s never closure,” he said. “There’s a hole. You know, the way I’ve imagined it straight through is, there’s a hole with jagged edges. And over time, the edges may smooth out a little bit. But the hole in your heart and the hole in your soul is still there.”

The jurors said they, too, had been to hell and not quite back, noting that the two months of horrific testimony, including photos of the two sisters’ charred bodies, left them sickened and sleepless.

Dr. Petit’s sister, Johanna Petit Chapman, said the family had sympathy for them.

“I was crying on the inside knowing [the evidence] they were looking at,” she said. “I can’t say enough how badly I feel for them that they got thrust into this because of two people’s decision to go in and just destroy life like that.”

Jury foreman Ian Cassell, a warehouse supervisor at Yale University, acknowledged that some panelists were “on the fence” at first about whether to put Hayes to death.

“We had a man’s life in our hands, and no one was having an easy time with that,” he said.

One question that some jurors had was whether Hayes might actually prefer that they sentence him to death, Cassell said.

“But given the evidence and testimony and the letter of the law, that’s where it brought us,” he said.

“It was tough. It was emotional,” he said of jurors’ decision. “[But[ it helped put closure on [everything].

“We shook hands and had a couple of hugs” afterward, Cassell said.

In the end, “Everyone was disgusted, horrified” by what Hayes and his cohort did, he said. “It was awful, awful. . . . It kept me up at night.”

Juror Dolores Carter said she was mentally drained, calling the death sentence “a very hard decision.”

Another juror, Aileen McKenna of Guilford, Conn., said, “My sympathies are for the family. I feel terrible for the Petits.

“I think he’s evil,” she said of Hayes. “It was a total, inhumane act. . . . This crime was past the point where any other penalty could be acceptable.”

Judge Jon Blue will officially impose the sentence at a hearing Dec. 2.