COLUMBUS -The man on trial in a series of highway shootings heard mocking voices from the television for years, leading him to drop wood and bags of concrete off overpasses and then to buy a gun, his attorney told jurors Thursday.
Charles McCoy Jr. believed people could read his mind and would use those thoughts to make fun of him, Mark Collins said as he opened the defense case.
McCoy, 29, is charged with 24 counts in 12 shootings on and near Columbus-area highways, involving vehicles, houses and a school, over five months in 2003 and 2004. One woman was killed.
The defense concedes that McCoy was the shooter but wants to convince jurors that he had severe, untreated paranoid schizophrenia that kept him from knowing right from wrong.
McCoy would be hospitalized if jurors accept his plea of innocence by reason of insanity, though defense attorneys are not allowed to tell the jury that. He could face the death penalty if convicted of aggravated murder in the November 2003 death of Gail Knisley, who was shot while riding in a car on Interstate 270, which circles Columbus. She was the only person struck in the string of shootings.
Collins said he will show that McCoy became progressively bizarre and sometimes threatening to his relatives. On a 0-100 scale on the severity of his paranoid schizophrenia, medical experts will testify that McCoy ranks between 85 and 95, the attorney said.
His mother, Ardith McCoy, testified that he was a star high school football player, with many friends. The phone rang off the hook
she said.
He went to Columbus State Community College but dropped out and started spending more time in the basement, she said. In 1997, she and her husband found ceiling tiles moved and basement paneling removed before McCoy tore down some heavy mirrors in the basement, saying he was looking for cameras.
He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
She wept when describing how the first medication he took left him aching all over and unable to turn his head.
We didn't hear him laugh for a couple of years she said.
She said she tried without success to make him take his medicine. He would hide the pills in his cheek, and she would find them later under his bed mattress or at the bottom of drinking glasses, she said.
During the time of the shootings, she said she would try to make him linger in the kitchen so she could watch him swallow, but he would excuse himself for the bathroom. She assumed he flushed them.
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