Dr. William Petit Jr. (AP)
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NEW HAVEN, Conn. — He derides his victims as “mesmerized rabbits.” He boasts of his “rapturous control” of the youngest daughter.
And most gallingly — because this one victim has survived to hear it — he taunts Dr. William Petit for not fighting back while getting clubbed nearly to death.
“Mr. Petit is a coward,” home-invasion suspect Joshua Komisarjevsky gloats in a confiscated prison diary read aloud for the first time in court yesterday, as part of convicted accomplice Steven Hayes’ bid to shift blame and avoid the death penalty.
“He ran away when he felt his own life was threatened,” Komisarjevsky, 29, wrote, “and left his wife and children to die at the hands of madmen.”
Petit — who barely survived Komisarjevsky’s brutal baseball-bat attack as he slept on his sunroom couch three years ago — sat stone-faced in New Haven Superior Court as the monster’s taunts rained down on him, read aloud by a court clerk at the behest of Hayes’ lawyers.
But after court, Petit — a noted endocrinologist who lost his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and daughters Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, to the tortures of rape and fire in the July 2007 attack — was livid.
“I really don’t want to dignify the ravings of a sociopath who appears to be a pathological liar as well,” Petit said, seeming to struggle to contain his rage.
“My testimony stands as truthful testimony,” he said, referring to his own account to jurors during the guilt phase of Hayes’ trial last month, in which Petit described losing seven pints of blood and having to literally roll his body across two back yards to summon help moments before his home went up in flames.
The diaries shoved the spotlight away, at least for one day, from Hayes, 47, who is hoping to avoid the needle by showing Komisarjevsky masterminded the attacks while he — a crack-addled patsy — was merely a “follower.”
The writings, inked in four composition books with black-and-white marbled covers, were confiscated a year after the attacks from Komisarjevsky’s jail cell, where he awaits his own death-penalty trial sometime next year.
In turns sniveling and exultant, Komisarjevsky calls the attacks, “The awakening of my shaddow [sic], repressed within, reaching its zenith that morning with the rapturous control of Michaela.”
Prosecutors say Michaela died tied to her bed, still in her pajamas, having been raped by Komisarjevsky. The two men doused Michaela and Hayley — also tied to her bed — with gasoline before lighting them on fire in an inhuman effort to cover their tracks, prosecutors say.
In his scrawlings, Komisarjevsky toggles sickeningly between self-worship and self-pity, between begging his victims’ forgiveness and taunting them for their fear and powerlessness.
“Michaela, angel of my nightmares,” he writes in a poem titled “Reflections of the Damned.”
“My pain to yours does not compare/How could I have turned my back, walking out that door/Knowing your fear and sorrow,” he writes.