Psychiatrist: Kim didn’t plan parents’ killings

Bryan Kim did not plot and cannot remember the grisly deaths of his parents at their Mount Spokane home on the night of Dec. 5, 2006, a Texas psychiatrist told a Spokane County Superior Court jury on Tuesday after the state rested its first-degree murder case against the Spokane teenager.

Dr. Michael Arambula, a forensic psychiatrist from San Antonio and the leading expert in Kim’s defense, said he’d reviewed the 19-year-old’s history of mental illness since elementary school, spent five hours with Kim in the Spokane County Jail and interviewed his 22-year old sister Jessica Kim about his sometimes-violent interactions with his parents, Richard and Terri Kim.

Arambula concluded that Kim’s serious problems with bipolar disorder started at an unusually young age with a diagnosis of depression at 11, and were compounded when he was misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder and given a powerful stimulant that triggered violent behavior.

“If someone has bipolar disorder and you give them a stimulant, it’s like throwing kerosene on a fire – it just makes it worse,” Arambula said under questioning from Kim’s public defender, John Stine.

In November 2002, Kim was hospitalized for two weeks in the psychiatric unit of Sacred Heart Medical Center. A week earlier, he’d hurled a golf club at his father, which careened off a wall, striking his mother. Doctors there took him off the stimulant – which had been increased just prior to the golf club incident – and gave him an antipsychotic drug after concluding he suffered from bipolar disorder and a precursor to schizophrenia, Arambula said.

“It’s very, very uncommon to be diagnosed with schizophrenia at that age,” Arambula added.

Arambula observed Kim on June 11 while he was in detention at the jail and awaiting trial on two charges of premeditated first-degree murder in the deaths of his parents.

People with bipolar disorder have depressive and manic phases of varying durations, and the symptoms get worse over time until they are fully expressed in young adults, Arambula said.

Kim’s illness expressed itself in a series of violent outbursts.

In September 2002, Kim locked himself in a bathroom at his family’s home and threatened to kill anyone who tried to get him out. The police were called, and they broke down the door. Two months later came the incident with the golf club. In May 2003, he pushed his mother down when she blocked his access to the family’s computer room, and the police were called. They responded again in July 2005, when Kim locked his mother out of the house on a balcony.

Before 2002, Kim wasn’t on the proper antipsychotic and antidepression medications for bipolar disease and even after they were prescribed, he didn’t take them daily as required, Arambula said.

It takes several weeks for the medicines to begin working on the body’s nerve cells, and if they’re not taken regularly, “it makes it worse,” Arambula added. Jessica Kim testified last week that her brother often failed to take his medicines, a major point of dissension with his parents.

Kim acted out at home but not at school with his friends, the psychiatrist said. His parents’ expectations of him – and their decision to make him move out of the family home by January 2007 – stressed him and lead to the final, violent explosion of December 5, 2006, Araumbula said.

“That pressure … was an accident waiting to happen,” the psychiatrist said.

Stine asked Arambula whether Kim acted with premeditation that night – the essential element in the state’s first-degree murder charges.

Given Kim’s mental illness, “it would be very difficult for him to plan something,” Arambula said, referring to the stabbing of Richard Kim and the bludgeoning and strangulation of Terri Kim as an “explosion.”

“These two deaths occurred and they were horrible – but it happened within that explosion,” Arambula said.

Stine asked whether Kim remembered the killings.

“He didn’t recall the events of his parents’ murder. … When people do something so horrendous, they can split it off, like a disconnected fugue,” Arambula said.

But Kim has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in his unconscious mind, the psychiatrist added. “Sometime, it will trickle into his consciousness.”

On cross-examination, Spokane County’s chief deputy criminal prosecutor Jack Driscoll pressed Arambula on whether someone diagnosed bipolar can still form premeditation and intent, including during the bloody cleanup of his parents’ bodies. Arambula said it depends on the seriousness of the illness.

At the conclusion of the defense case, Driscoll called his own forensic expert in rebuttal.

Psychiatrist Dr. William H. Grant of Eastern State Hospital said Kim suffers from an “antisocial personality disorder,” plus amnesia.

A diagnosis of bipolar disorder “was not confirmed” in his analysis, Grant said.

“My opinion is he did have the ability to premeditate and form the intent to kill,” Grant added.

Driscoll asked Grant why Kim had been diagnosed as bipolar during a previous stay at Sacred Heart’s psychiatric unit.

That diagnosis was made by a psychiatrist “who’s trying to help a troubled kid and put him on medications. But two homicides demand a much higher degree of scrutiny,” Grant replied.

Kim is prone to anger, shows no remorse and is a practiced liar, Grant added. He said he interviewed Jessica Kim, who told him her brother lied to their parents about his failing grades and once threatened her with a knife when the two siblings were home alone.

Quoting from a report by a psychologist who worked with him to evaluate Kim, Grant said Kim was “unreliable, egocentric and irresponsible. … These people have trouble planning ahead.”

On cross-examination, public defender Stine seized on that statement, which appeared to rebut the state’s assertion that Kim was capable of planning the attacks on his parents and organizing a cleanup afterwards. Stine also got Grant to admit he’s never dealt before with the case of a teenager who’s killed his parents.