Dr.
William Petit Speaks Out for the First Time
Oprah.com |
December 09, 2010
In one of the most
horrific crimes in recent memory, the Petit family was
destroyed during an unimaginable night of evil that left people across the
country gasping in horror. Three years later, Oprah visits Dr. William Petit at
his parents'
Dr. Petit had been married to his wife, Jennifer, a nurse, for 22
years. Their 17-year-old daughter Hayley was captain of her high school
basketball team and headed to
On a Sunday morning in July 2007, the
close-knit Petit family attended church services in
their
According to
police, a convicted felon who was out on parole randomly spotted Jennifer and
Michaela at a neighborhood convenience store. After following them home,
44-year-old Steven Hayes and 26-year-old Joshua Komisarjevsky allegedly plotted
out a horrific home invasion.
Michaela cooked Sunday
dinner for her family that night, and Dr. Petit fell asleep reading the paper
while the girls watched television and headed off to bed.
At 3 a.m., the two armed intruders broke in. Dr. Petit was the
first victim, bludgeoned with a baseball bat and tied unconscious to a pole in
the basement. Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela were bound to their beds and
tortured throughout the night.
At daybreak,
Jennifer was forced to go to a bank and withdraw money for her kidnappers. She
slipped a note to the bank teller explaining her family's hostage situation and
withdrew $15,000, desperately hoping it would save her family's
lives.
Instead, the unthinkable happened. Michaela was allegedly sexually
assaulted while tied to her childhood bed. Just minutes after returning from the
bank with the money, Jennifer was raped and strangled to death. Her body and the
house were doused with gasoline.
Can Dr. Petit forgive the attackers? Watch
what he says.
Meanwhile, Dr. Petit woke up in the basement. With his feet still
bound, he hopped up the stairs and crawled across the yard to a neighbor's house
to get help—but it was too late. The Petits' home quickly went up in flames.
Hayley managed to free herself from her restraints but died at the top of the
stairs from smoke inhalation. Michaela died still bound to her bed. Their
mother's body was burned beyond recognition.
"I went to sleep one night in a nice home with a loving family and
basically awakened in an emergency room naked on a gurney with no clothes, no
family, no home," Dr. Petit says. "Everything was
gone."
According to police,
just minutes after the house set on fire, Hayes and Komisarjevsky stole the
family's minivan and crashed head-on into a police roadblock while trying to
flee the gruesome scene.
Although it was extremely difficult, Dr. Petit was present every
day of Steven Hayes' trial. "I was the only face left in our family, so I needed
to be there," he says. Dr. Petit says he left the room during the medical
examiner's reports. "Too much to hear. I cried," he
says.
More than three years after the murders,
Hayes was convicted on all counts except arson and sentenced to death. After the
verdict was given, Dr. Petit spoke from outside the courthouse. "This is a
verdict for justice," he said. "I think the defendant faces far more serious
punishment from the Lord than he can ever face from
mankind."
Jury selection for the trial of
Hayes' alleged co-conspirator, Komisarjevsky, is expected to begin in February
2011. Kominsarjevsky has pled not guilty to all charges.
Oprah: Was there any
satisfaction for you [in Hayes] getting the death penalty as a
sentence?
Dr. Petit: Just the
satisfaction that I think it's the appropriate penalty. I think God wants us to
hate evil. I think God tells us to abide by man's law.
Oprah: How did it feel to
you to sit in that courtroom every day and have your family referred to as "the
victims" or "alleged victims" and have the perpetrator of this crime referred to
by his name every day?
Dr.
Petit: It's the death by a thousand paper cuts. You're absolutely right.
You sit there and they talk about the "alleged victims." And I always think, "I
will drive you to the cemetery and show you the 'alleged victims.'" You know?
The decedents. You want to jump up and say: "They have
names. They're people. Their names were Jennifer and Hayley and
Michaela."
Although the media has
been fixated on how the Petit women died, Dr. Petit
wants the world to remember how they lived.
Jennifer Hawke met Dr. Petit in 1981 when he was a doctor and she was a
pediatric nurse at the same hospital. They married four years later and had two
daughters. Jennifer suffered from multiple sclerosis, but those who knew her say
she never complained.
Family and friends say Jennifer loved being a mother and raising
her girls and was also a second mom to students at the boarding school where she
worked. "The boarding school life, there are a lot of kids from far away," Dr.
Petit says. "So she spent a lot of time with the kids—part nurse and part
mother."
Dr. Petit has not returned to his
medical practice since losing his family, but he thinks Jennifer would want him
to. "She'd probably want me to go back to medicine," he says. "Wives are
prejudiced. She said I was the smartest guy she ever
knew."
Jennifer and Dr.
Petit's oldest daughter, Hayley, excelled in school and served as co-captain of
both her high school basketball and rowing teams. She was an "A" student and was
headed to prestigious
Hayley was a caring big sister and a natural leader. She started
Hayley's Hope, an organization to raise money for multiple sclerosis in hopes of
saving her mom.
In Dr. Petit's impact statement, he said one of the things he will regret most is
that Hayley didn't live to have a one true love. Hayley was not dating, but Dr.
Petit says he knows there was one boy who was very special to her. "He's a
wonderful kid," he says. "He's a varsity basketball player, and I think she
loved him."
Michaela, the Petits'
youngest daughter, was also known as KK Rosebud, a special nickname her dad gave
her. She was a sixth-grader who loved to dance and jump on the trampoline. She
had a talent for gardening, and although she was just 11 years old, her true
passion was cooking. Dr. Petit says Michaela loved to watch the Food Network and
cooked the family's last meal, bruschetta and pasta.
Michaela's favorite quote was: "Be the change you wish to see in
the world."
Watch this tribute to the lives of Jennifer,
Hayley and Michaela.
At his
family's memorial service, Dr. Petit says he had a strong need to speak for
Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela. "If there's anything to be gained from the
senseless deaths of my beautiful family, it's for us to all go forward," he
said. "Help a neighbor, fight for a cause, love your
family."
Oprah: Are you able to think
of their life and the fullness of their life? Or are you still more focused on
the day they died and how they died?
Dr. Petit: There's some of both. The
daytime's easier to focus on positive things. Falling asleep and waking up are
the hardest times. The transitions from sleep to
wakefulness. It pretty much comes back every day.
Oprah: Do you fear going
to sleep?
Dr. Petit: In the beginning, I
feared sleeping. ... I was completely fried. I was just walking around in a
daze, and just intrusive thoughts banging into your brain every second, every
minute, where you're playing events over and over and over again in your
mind.
Dr. Petit's extended
family is as close as families get. His sister Hanna Chapman was best friends
with Jennifer. And Hanna always treated her brother's daughters like they were
her own children.
When police needed someone to identify the bodies of Jennifer,
Hayley and Michaela, they asked Hanna and Dr. Petit's brother Glenn to go. Hanna
says she still struggles with what she saw at the police station. "On top of my
pain, I have the horrid images of the torture that they suffered for seven hours
in that house, in their sanctuary, in their bedrooms in the middle of the night
in the dark," she says. "I can't help but think what they were thinking, or what
they were saying, and what they were praying for."
Despite the emotional toll of identifying her family members'
bodies—Jennifer's was so disfigured she had to be identified using dental
records—Hanna says she doesn't have second thoughts about agreeing to the
request. "I don't regret having done it; I regret having to do it," she says. "I
regret that they asked any one of us to do it. I regret the fact that this evil
came into their home."
Dr. Petit says some
people have tried to help him cope with grief by advising him to live in the
moment. "I thought, 'That's okay for people who have a past they can touch and a
future they can dream for,'" he says. "But when you feel like a lot of your past
is gone and there's no future, the present loses some
meaning."
Instead, Dr. Petit says he has found a reason to keep
living—though he says he thought about suicide—through religion and faith. "I
thought in the afterlife if I was going to meet up with my family, if I did
that, then maybe I would never meet up with them again," he says. "I wasn't
willing to take that chance."
Oprah: Will there ever be
closure for you?
Dr. Petit: I don't think
there's ever closure. I just...I don't think there is. People will probably
argue with me, but I just don't think you can lose your whole family and have
closure. Like I said, there's a jagged hole in your heart, there's a jagged hole
in your soul. Over time, the waves of goodness going back and forth maybe smooth
the jagged edges a little bit, but the hole remains. I don't think you fill it
in. Forty months later, that's how I feel.
Watch Dr. Petit talk about
what Jennifer and the girls would want him to do now.
Started with money
donated by friends, community members and complete strangers, the Petit Family
Foundation preserves the memory of Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela by promoting
causes the Petit women held close to their hearts. So
far, the foundation has raised more than $1.5 million.
Learn more about the Petit
Family Foundation.
"What we are
trying to do is to fund educational programs, especially in the sciences, and
hopefully that will help young women," Dr. Petit says. "Secondly, to help
perhaps with the educational aspects of some chronic illnesses like multiple
sclerosis—that Jen had—and certainly to help those affected by
violence."
Watch how one of Michaela's friends keeps
her memory alive.
Dr. Petit
says the foundation has helped him see that the world is not only darkness and
evil. "It makes me feel that there are really a lot of good people in the world
that reach out," he says. "You know, somebody from
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on Friday, March 9, 2012
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