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Home invasion victim's ordeal goes on - CNN.com
Frankly, lethal injection is too civilized a response to this animals.
On July 23, 2007, at about 3 a.m., two men broke into the home where Dr. Petit, who was 50 at the time, lived with his wife, Jennifer-Hawke-Petit, 48, and their two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. Jennifer Hawke-Petit had multiple sclerosis.
The men -- identified by police and prosecutors as Steven Hayes, 47, and Joshua Komisarjevsky, 30 -- allegedly beat Dr. Petit with a baseball bat while he slept, bound his wrists and ankles, then took him to the basement of the family's home and tied him to a pole as he drifted in and out of consciousness.
They stand accused of sexually assaulting Jennifer Hawke-Petit and one of the girls, tying them up, setting the house on fire, and fleeing as it burned. They are accused of first forcing Jennifer Hawke-Petit to go to a bank and withdraw $15,000 for them, with the promise that if she did, she and her family would be permitted to live.
Instead, the men are accused of killing her and the two girls. Hayes and Komisarjevsky are each charged with multiple counts of murder, rape, kidnapping and arson.
Both men -- they were caught by police as they drove away from the burning house -- offered to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences instead of the death penalty. But prosecutors believed that the appropriate punishment for Hayes and Komisarjevsky was death. Dr. Petit -- who on that day in 2007 managed, while bleeding profusely from his wounds (he lost as much as seven pints of blood), to free himself from the basement where he was tied up and crawl to a neighbor's house to plead for help for his family -- agreed with the prosecutors.
Which brings us to these weeks in 2010, with Hayes on trial, and Dr. Petit in daily attendance at the proceedings.
Frankly, lethal injection is too civilized a response to this animals.