Because You Loved Me (15 page)

William “Billy” Joseph Sullivan Jr. was born on March 24, 1985, at 5:25
P.M
. According to Billy, he weighed five pounds five ounces. He spent his formative years in Willimantic, a town located in the northeastern section of Connecticut, which has developed a reputation over the past two decades for its seemingly endless supply of heroin. Called “Heroin Town” by the state’s largest daily newspaper, the
Hartford Courant
, in a series of articles that sparked outrage from locals and public officials, while preaching to the choir of community members who believed their town was beyond repair, Willimantic is surrounded by some of the most expensive and beautiful real estate Connecticut has to offer. Billy lived on Kathleen Drive, just off Route 6, heading into downtown from Route 32, where the University of Connecticut is a mere fifteen-minute drive in the opposite direction. In a rather cute little ranch-style home set on a postage-stamp piece of property overlooking the city, Billy shared the 1,200-square-foot house—a dream of his mother’s, he called it—with his four younger sisters, two of whom are twins, and his mother, Patricia, a woman Billy called, in a school essay he wrote titled “What My Mother Means to Me,” the “base of the family,” a “superhero.”

So proud of his mother’s integrity and will to make the family work as a unit despite a life of adversity, Billy stood up for Pat at every opportunity. He viewed the woman as a fighter and survivor.

By her own admission, Pat Sullivan hadn’t been a good mother. Not even close. When she was pregnant with Billy, “I drank every day and smoked cigarettes,” she said later in court. At least a six-pack of beer, sometimes more, every day. Because of the drinking and smoking, Billy was born four weeks premature. He was “very small.” From his first moments outside the womb, Pat added, little Billy had trouble breathing, had turned bubble gum red because of problems ingesting oxygen and spent several postbirth days in an incubator.

Pat was living in Norwich, Connecticut, then, with a son from a previous relationship, and Billy’s father, William Sullivan Sr. Norwich is located east of Willimantic, a twenty-minute ride. Situated at the point where the Shetucket River and the Thames River meet, some of Norwich is seedy and run-down, even though a massive revitalization project is in the works. Weeks-old Billy, William Sr., Pat and Pat’s son lived in an apartment complex downtown. Pat said William drank every day, in excess of a six-pack of beer or more. When he got drunk, she claimed, he was violent.

One night, Pat recalled, she was carrying eighteen-month-old Billy in one arm while arguing with William over having his daughters from a previous relationship stay at the apartment. It was too small a place for everyone. Pat had an infant. Priorities, man. Think about the kids.

Both had been drinking heavily that day. As Pat went for the door, William screamed at her.

“Come back here….”

Pat walked toward the door without responding, but when she turned around, William snuck up from behind and punched her in the face, she said “barely…hitting Billy.”

Blood poured down Pat’s forehead. William had opened a gash above her eye. Little Billy screamed as the blood spewing from Pat’s head washed over him.

It hadn’t been the first time William struck Pat, causing injury, she later claimed. He also liked to push her around and shove her into walls and doors.

After doctors put seventeen stitches in her head, Pat called the police and had William arrested. She couldn’t take it anymore. Getting drunk together and arguing was one thing; but violence was behavior she couldn’t put up with. Not with little kids in the house.

After having William arrested, Pat took off and moved into an apartment in town owned by his parents. It was above a Laundromat many of the local welfare mothers in the neighborhood frequented. By then, Billy was suffering from nightmares brought on, Pat believed, by the violent episodes he had witnessed in his young life—a continuation of the dysfunction. A cycle. Billy was constantly waking up screaming. Not being able to breathe. He developed a severe allergy to milk products and had bouts with “projectile vomiting. He wasn’t eating the way like he should,” Pat commented later.

Then asthma kicked in. By the time he was two-and-a-half, Billy had been to the emergency room five or six times.

A few days after settling into the new apartment, William called to see how they were doing. Pat said she had some news.

“I’m pregnant.”

They talked and decided to stop drinking so they could live together in somewhat of a normal environment. Pat stopped four months after learning she was pregnant. William, though, couldn’t. He continued drinking, she said, and started to hit her again.

Over the next two years, Pat said, she began to notice a remarkable change in Billy.

“As a baby, he was very excitable. Loud noises, like motorcycles going by…would always startle him…. He became very hyperactive as a toddler.”

William’s parents eventually evicted them after a problem with one of Pat’s son’s friends staying at the apartment.

With nowhere to go, according to Pat, they moved into what she described as a “welfare motel” in Groton, Connecticut, just east of Norwich.

One day, Pat, Billy and her older son drove to Norwich from Groton. It was about two months after they had moved into the welfare motel. Norwich was one of the only places in the area where Pat could do laundry. William was upstairs, above the Laundromat, visiting his parents. Pat dropped little Billy off so he could spend some time with his dad while she took care of the laundry. Her older son went to Willimantic to take his driver’s license test.

While Pat was folding laundry, she heard on the radio that “there was a fire, a big fire in Groton.”

From the pay telephone in the Laundromat, Pat called upstairs to ask William if he’d heard anything about the fire. She was worried the welfare motel they lived in might be burning down.

“Have you heard?” asked Pat.

“No.”

Pat explained what was going on.

“I’m going down there to see,” said William.

When Pat finished folding the laundry and her son returned from the Department of Motor Vehicles, she went upstairs to grab Billy and head back home. She had no idea William had done it, but he had taken Billy with him to go check out the fire in Groton.

Much of the motel had burned. William was there with Billy watching the entire tragedy unfold. Pat didn’t see Billy until later that night.

“He was really scared because he didn’t know if any of his friends were in the fire,” Pat recalled.

In the days that followed, Pat noticed a notable change in her young son’s demeanor. Billy was having even more trouble sleeping. He had constant nightmares and what he described to doctors as “death thoughts.”

He was four years old, explained Pat, and distinctively recounting thoughts he was having about being killed. It seemed odd. He was so young.

Pat put him in therapy months later after several episodes at home that proved Billy needed professional help in dealing with what had been a chaotic early life. Since Billy had been born, Pat had two daughters. One afternoon, as she was in another section of the motel room, Billy took a pair of scissors and cut off all of his sister’s hair. She was two years old. Then on another occasion, he took a tube of toothpaste and covered his other sister with it.

After a year of intense counseling with United Services in Norwich, Billy started sleeping better. His behavior toned down a bit and he stopped acting out against his sisters. He even seemed more social and calm.

So Pat took him out of therapy.

According to Patricia Sullivan, Billy was six years old when he first mentioned a desire to commit suicide. They were driving through downtown Norwich one afternoon. At the heart of Norwich’s revitalization project over the past two decades is the city’s prized marina, where yachts and speedboats, fishing boats and Jet Skis, hang out for much of the spring and summer. It is a bustling area of the city, with perfectly manicured parks and docks. Businesses in the region thrive during summer months when beachgoers and gamblers heading to nearby Misquamicut State Beach, thirty minutes away in Westerly, Rhode Island, and Foxwoods Casino, ten minutes away in Ledyard, Connecticut, pass through.

Pat had finally dredged up the nerve to divorce William by then. It should have been done a long time ago. But she found the strength, somehow, to go through with it, and pledged to raise her kids in a healthy environment by herself. It was hard, she said, because although William was abusive and sometimes arrogant, little Billy had bonded with his father. They were close. During the months before the divorce, William had been moving in and out of the apartment and contaminating the home with the same abusive behavior he had in the past. Billy may have loved his father, but he was obviously harboring a lot of hatred, anger and emotion toward the behavior he had witnessed. It was best to get William out of his life.

No sooner was William gone for good, then Billy started acting out all over again, Pat claimed. He began “out of control behavior and violence and throwing things and hitting things and people.”

As Pat and little Billy headed across the bridge near the marina in downtown Norwich that afternoon, Billy sat contentedly in his booster chair in the backseat. While crossing the bridge, Billy pointed to the water below.

“I’m going to kill myself over there!” he said.

“Really?” Pat responded. She didn’t want to overreact, she claimed, and startle her son by announcing how odd it was that he had said such a thing. Instead, she asked, “And how are you going to do that, Billy?”

“I’m going to go up on the biggest rock and jump into the river because I don’t know how to swim.”

“Is that so?”

“The river will take me away.”

“Billy?”

“Mommy…”

“Billy, why would you want to do that?”

Billy didn’t answer. Pat later said she was “shocked” by the comment—but it proved to her that Billy needed to return to counseling immediately.

From the time Billy started kindergarten, problems followed him. Not with the curriculum or teachers, but with breaking away from the family and being able to sit still long enough to learn anything. He had trouble making friends in and out of school.

By the time he was seven years old, Billy had gone through kindergarten twice. He had four sisters by then to contend with, and Pat had moved the family into an apartment complex in Norwich.

Billy’s sisters often had sleepovers with the neighborhood girls. On one occasion, one of the girls’ brothers asked if he could spend the night, too.

“So I allowed him to do that,” Pat said later. It might be good for Billy to interact with another boy.

As the kids played the following morning, they made tents out of blankets in an upstairs bedroom. The girls were in one tent, and Billy and the boy were in another.

Pat went upstairs every so often to check on the kids. During one trip, she noticed Billy’s face was flushed and rosy red, as if he had been running around.

“What’s going on, Billy?” asked Pat.

Billy shrugged. He wouldn’t answer.

Pat didn’t think anything of it. Just a bunch of children having fun with their imaginations, running wild, as kids often do.

A few weeks later, while Billy was in therapy, Pat said she “found out…that [he claimed he] had been molested by that boy” in the tent.

From there, Pat noticed a deeper change in Billy’s psyche. His normal antics of acting out turned more risky. He was “jumping off roofs, jumping out of trees, just in general doing very dangerous things.”

Then Pat’s oldest son moved out. Billy was devastated. He was close to his half brother and looked up to him. Here was another male leaving Billy’s life. Was it something he did? Something he said?

Kids tend to blame themselves.

Sometime later, Billy’s grandmother died. Then a friend Billy had played kickball with in the neighborhood was killed after a truck sitting on a car lift fell on him. Billy was in Elmcrest at the time, a nearby psychiatric hospital. Pat told him about the accident there, which she said was the best place to break the news. When Billy heard, he said, “I will see him and hear him and talk to him again.”

Pat took it as another sign that Billy was planning to commit suicide. He was eight years old. He stayed at Elmcrest for thirty days. Pat said he was calling the house and acting out on the phone. His anger over being taken away from the family got worse. The hospital had to routinely restrain him at times and, she added, often “put [him] in one of those little rubber rooms.”

When he was released, Billy seemed a bit more calm. But was it really him, or the mixture of medications he was now on? Pat’s medicine cabinet at home was seemingly transformed into a pharmacy: There was Risperdal, Depakote, Ritalin and Prozac. Then lithium and BuSpar, Zoloft and Zyprexa. Prexadone. Clonidine and Elonzapene. Neurontin and Thorazine. Not all at the same time. But doctors worked to find the right cocktail that would allow Billy to live a somewhat “normal” life.

During the spring of 1994, no sooner did it seem things were beginning to settle down when the mayhem started again. Billy was older and bigger. Even stronger. Pat had respite workers come to the apartment to help her with the kids. Billy went after them one day with a baseball bat and threatened to swing. After waving the bat near one of the workers’ heads, Billy charged at one of his sisters’ bicycles and demolished it in a fit of rage.

Pat lost the state’s help after the incident.

So Billy was sent back to Elmcrest for another thirty-day stay. After Pat brought him home and he continued the same behavior, she put him in Newington Children’s Hospital. He had become part of the psychiatric hospital revolving-door syndrome. Anything doctors tried was akin to putting a Band-Aid on a cut that required stitches. The bleeding slowed, but never stopped completely.

When he got out of Newington, Billy started hitting his sisters and running away. By the time he turned eleven, in 1996, he had been admitted to two more hospitals for the same behavioral issues that had plagued him throughout the past six or more years. Counseling had an ambivalent effect; Billy was getting nothing out of it because he failed to participate, especially if Pat sat in on the session. On top of all that, Billy was now being disrespectful to his teachers, cursing and threatening them, starting fights with other students, getting expelled, throwing things at school officials and students.

His life was out of control. He was an emotional
Titanic.
The slightest comment he didn’t agree with set Billy off into a fit. Some people were scared of him, while others felt sorry for him. Pat was frustrated and feared there was nothing anyone could do.

So she petitioned the state of Connecticut for a probation officer. Billy had to meet with the guy twice a month and discuss his behavior. Now he was accountable, on some level, for everything he did.

After that, Billy calmed down at school, but he was still acting out at home. With five kids and no child support, Pat contemplated going back to school herself so she could find a decent job and get off welfare. However, she couldn’t keep a babysitter long enough because Billy was so out of control.

In March 1998, an incident took place that showed how deep-seated Billy’s problems were, and, more important, where his emotional problems were rooted. He was sitting in class one day when he looked out the window and saw a truck drive by the school. He knew his father worked for an appliance company as a truck driver. Billy believed his father still wanted to see him, but for some reason couldn’t. Or was being told to stay away.

Staring out the window, watching the truck drive by the school, Billy got up from his desk and ran outside.

“Dad,” he yelled, “Dad” as the truck drove away from the school.

School officials were called. They went after Billy as he chased the truck. After catching up with him, they convinced Billy to return to school, where he started acting crazy, “kicking and screaming and yelling.” The school called the local hospital and had Billy committed.

The hospital felt Billy was so out of control, so far removed from reality, that the nurse reportedly gave him a shot of Haldol, which, by its pharmaceutical name, Haloperidol, is often used to treat schizophrenia in children suffering from hallucinations, manic phases, outbursts of aggression, agitation, disorganized and chronic, psychotic thinking.

Thus, Billy went through another phase of stays at psychiatric hospitals all over Connecticut. He was arrested twice during one stay for fighting. His longest residence turned out to be a year at Riverview Children’s Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, about an hour’s drive from Willimantic, where Pat and her daughters were now living.

Within five years, it seemed Pat was right back to where she had started, as far as Billy’s emotional well-being. One step forward turned into three steps back. Billy needed help. Desperately. But it was clear that no matter what type of help he received, none of it worked.

With that, Pat threw up her hands. She had no idea what to do.