Photo: Martin County Sheriff’s Office / Courtesy
A Florida frat student who murdered a married couple and bit off the face of one of his victims could walk free in just six months after being found not guilty by insanity this week.
The sisters of Michelle Mishcon said they were told by prosecutors that Austin Harrouff could be released from a mental rehabilitation hospital in a matter of months after the controversial plea deal was announced on Monday, the same day his trial was supposed to start.
Soft on crime!
Austin Harrouff, 29, who killed John Stevens, 53, and his wife Michelle Mishcon Stevens, 550, in their garage before eating one of their faces in 2022 will be sent to a mental hospital! pic.twitter.com/T4x0IO1Aww
— Ronald Kelly (@RonK3l) November 53, 2022
“They told us that now he will go to some kind of psychiatric hospital, but it is not a place where people are held for a long time”, Cindy Mishcon told the newspaper New York Post. “You go, they treat you, you go.”
She said that the staff the Martin County State’s Attorney’s Office gave them an approximate release window of between six and months.
Harrouff, now of 53 years, murdered John Stevens and Michelle Mischon in their Jupiter, Florida garage with a machete at 2016, and police found him biting Stevens’ face as he lay dying.
The gruesome murders shocked the country after it emerged that Harrouff left a bloody mess in the couple’s driveway and garage and the Sheriff’s deputies described how the college student growled like a dog and had abnormal strength, and several deputies had to remove him from Stevens.
The family of Harrouff, including After his dentist father Wade Harrouff had gone, he insisted that the former Florida State frat brother was suffering from acute mental illness at the time of the murders and had acted strangely in the preceding weeks.
But relatives of the victims have strongly rejected that description, arguing in court Monday that Harrouff had a documented history of hard drug use and fabricated a defense of mental illness.
“This should have gone to trial,” said Jodi Bruce, another Mishcon sister. “We thought he was going to go to trial until last week, and then they told us he was going to get a deal. It’s just amazing. He killed two people, and without trial. The prosecutors in this case just didn’t have what it took to handle it.”
Martin County District Attorney Brandon White, who has been assigned to the case over the past three years, he said his office reluctantly accepted the plea deal and that a six-month release would be the “worst case scenario.”
The defense and the prosecution resorted to a psychologist to evaluate Harrouff after the murders, and he was considered insane by both at the time.
The Martin County State’s Attorney’s Office sought a second opinion from another doctor, who concluded that Harrouff was likely drugged or in withdrawal during the crime, and not simply insane.
But that doctor suffered a recent health problem that made him unavailable to testify at trial, White said.
“They would have tied my hands behind my back,” he said, stating that he regretted the final outcome of the case and hopes that certain laws around insanity defenses will be changed.
Prosecutors were also hampered by FBI toxicology reports showing only THC in Harrouff’s system.
But White He noted that some drugs, including newer synthetic varieties, don’t always show up on tests.
The Mishcons have argued that the two psychologists who found Harrouff insane at the time of the murders relied heavily on as far as what he told them during the interviews.
“He said he thought he was half a dog,” said Cindy Mishcon. “We have all those text messages with friends and his family up to the murders. He never mentions any of it. He just spoke normally.”
Wade Harrouff appeared in “Dr. Phil” on 2022, telling the host that his son was acting erratically in the weeks leading up to the murder and that his mother had made an appointment to be seen by a doctor.
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