LITTLE ROCK — A 28-year-old Little Rock man with a history of psychiatric problems was found fit to stand trial Monday on accusations that he stabbed a dog to death while stealing a baseball cap from a southwest Little Rock home. But Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright declined to rule on whether Adam Lee Waller was sane at the time, leaving that question up to a jury.
Charged with aggravated animal cruelty and residential burglary, Waller faces a maximum penalty of 26 years in prison when he stands trial in March.
Waller was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by Dr. Lisa Doguet, a psychiatrist at the State Hospital. Doguet testified on Monday that despite his mental illness, Waller was able to both control his behavior and tell the difference between right and wrong at the time of the May burglary at the Mabelvale Cutoff home of Gary Bise. Waller has pleaded innocent by reason of mental disease.
Defense attorney Brandy Turner challenged Doguet’s findings, pointing to Waller’s history of mental illness. She said he once confessed to a nonexistent murder and has been institutionalized three times in the past six years, chiefly for reporting to hear orders from God.
“The pattern is the same: God is telling him to do something,” Turner told the judge.
Waller was institutionalized in November 2009 in Missouri after claiming God had told him that he and his girlfriend had to go to his father’s home or they would die, a claim that made the woman fear Waller might kill her, the defense attorney said. In 2004, he was acquitted of terroristic threatening on mental-health grounds, Turner said, and he was institutionalized in April, about a month before the dog was killed, for suicidal fixations.
He claimed God had told him his dead brother’s body was in the Mabelvale Cutoff home, Doguet told the judge, but was also able to give “nonpsychotic” descriptions of the break-in and killing the dog. She said he’d described how he decided to break into the home because no one was at the house and how he’d stabbed the dog to keep the barking animal quiet.
“God didn’t tell him to take those actions,” deputy prosecutor Kathleen McDonald told the judge.
Turner asked the judge to either acquit Waller on insanity grounds or order him committed to the State Hospital for further study. The fact that Waller is accused of breaking into a home and stealing a baseball cap shows that he is too mentally ill to stand trial, Turner told the judge.
“It doesn’t make sense that all he’d take is a cap,” she said.
According to court files, Bise reported the break-in shortly after midnight on May 25, telling police a stranger, who’d been doing yard work for a neighbor, asked Bise if he could charge his cell phone inside his house. Bise, who was moving out of the home, agreed, but said he and the man both left the home a short time later.
Bise said he returned to the residence after about 15 minutes to find a back-door window broken out and his dog dead behind a storage building, hidden under leaves and behind a garbage can. A steak knife was in the dog’s neck and the pitbull/mastiff puppy had several stab wounds, police said.
All that was missing from the house was a gray cap decorated with skulls, playing cards and the phrase “I’m all in.”
Waller was arrested in the neighborhood about seven hours later, with blood on his pants, according to an arrest report. He was reported to have a gray cap in his pocket, but reports don’t say whether the hat was Bise’s.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 11/23/2010