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Mental Health: 'Before it's too late'

Record (Stockton, CA) - 10/20/2014

Oct. 20--Daniel William Marsh was just 15 when, in the predawn hours of April 14, 2013, he stealthily sliced through a screen and broke into Oliver Northup and Claudia Maupin's condominium in Davis. He followed the sounds of their snoring, then savagely tortured and murdered the elderly pair.

In the weeks and months before the slayings, during which at one point he was placed on involuntary psychiatric hold, Marsh repeatedly shared his disturbing thoughts with therapists.

Marsh's ghoulish imaginings were so alarming, one therapist broke confidentiality and notified authorities that January. Davis police spoke only briefly with the high schooler -- who had spent five months as a cadet and in 2009 was hailed a hero for saving the life of his heart-attack stricken father -- then took no further action. Three months later, Northup and Maupin were dead.

'I have to find value in this'

Kathy Schick, one of Northup's daughters, is struggling to reconcile a faith that compels her to see the good in every soul with a crime so horrific it made headlines across the nation and drove some traumatized jurors into therapy.

"I believe that every human life has value, but I'm having a really hard time with, what is the value of Daniel Marsh's life? That's a hard one," said Schick, 67, an adjunct instructor of microbiology at San Joaquin Delta College's Mountain House campus and a specialist for the Essig Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Berkeley.

"That's where I have the spiritual dilemma," added Schick, who moved to Stockton in 1972 and serves as president of the San Joaquin County League of Women Voters. "I have to find a value in this. And I'm still working on it."

It is her hope that a measure of that value will come as part of a nationwide Mental Health First Aid grant program through which Stockton Unified just received $100,000 over two years for training in how to better detect and respond to mental illness. As distressing as revisiting the details is, if her story prompts school workers to reach just one struggling teen, it will help lend meaning to the tragedy.

"He had planned this for years," Schick said. "That's why I wish that there were a way to catch this kind of problem. I guess there wasn't any way anybody could do anything about it."

'I had to do it'

In the dead of night, dressed in black and wearing a mask, gloves and tape-covered shoes, Marsh tried at least 50 homes before finding what he was looking for just a few doors down from his own father's condo: an unlocked window.

"That night I couldn't take it anymore. I had to do it," Marsh would later tell police.

Using his mother's hunting knife, he cut a flap in the screen, then hoisted himself inside. Unaware, Northup and Maupin slept on.

Northup, a longtime attorney, was 87; Maupin, a pastoral associate at the Unitarian Universalist Church her husband had helped found and in which Schick grew up, was 76.

Marsh heard the couple snoring and followed the sound to the master bedroom, he later admitted in a graphic, six-hour-long videotaped confession punctuated by his own laughter. The teen stood silently in the room as they slept, "thinking how he was going to kill them," Detective Ariel Pineda later testified. "He felt elated; his body was trembling."

Days before, Marsh had posted on his blog: "My Head is a Very Dark Place."

'It's finally happening'

Maupin woke up first. She saw Marsh standing over their bed and screamed. That's when the stabbings began. So many, it was hard to tell how many times, said Yolo County Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Cabral, who prosecuted the case, among the worst in his nearly 30-year career.

Northup heard his wife's cries and sprang up. Marsh incapacitated him, then kept going, continuing to attack the couple. Said Pineda: "He didn't know why; it just felt right."

"It's finally happening," Marsh later recounted during his confession. "I'm not gonna lie. It felt great. It was pure happiness and adrenaline rushing over me. It was the most exhilarating feeling I've ever felt."

Police prevented calls to family

That Sunday evening, one of Maupin's daughters grew concerned after not hearing from the couple all day. She drove to their home and saw their car parked outside.

"She went around back to see why they would not answer the door and noticed the cut screen," Schick said. That's when she called police.

They kept her all night, preventing her from letting other family members know what had happened. That's why Schick's sister Mary saw a picture that Monday morning of their parents' condo, surrounded with crime scene tape, on the 7 a.m. news.

Schick remembers that morning vividly, her sister's phone call. "I noticed that on my phone, I had all these little blinking numbers, that my brothers, who don't call me all the time, two of my brothers were trying to reach me, and I thought, 'That's kind of odd.' "

"My sister said, 'I want you to hear it now. I don't want you to find out the way I did.' "

Probe made family's life 'miserable'

Two days after the murders, Marsh met with his regular psychiatrist, Dr. Cheyenne He. It would be two months before police tied the crime to the high school sophomore; he left no evidence behind.

"A cloud of fear descended over the city of Davis," Police Chief Landy Black would later say of the dark days that followed.

After discounting Northup's appeals clients and with no leads in the case, investigators zeroed in on the textbook suspects: the victims' families.

"That was so hard on our family. ... It actually was very offensive that they suspected anybody in the family, because to me, it was very clearly somebody who was a sociopath," Schick said. "And the FBI profiler told them that the first week, that it had to be a teenage boy. ... That didn't stop the Davis police from making my family miserable."

A month later, in May 2013, Marsh was expelled for bringing a knife onto campus, then confronted the friend who had ratted him out.

That was the break police needed. The boy and Marsh's girlfriend turned him in. He was arrested on June 17, 2013. Police found stashed in plastic containers in his mother's garage the clothes he wore that night, stained with blood that matched the victims' DNA; he kept them as souvenirs.

System failed

The system failed the disturbed teen, Yolo County Deputy Public Defender Ronald Johnson said in closing arguments before September conviction, tying hands during Marsh's long descent into mental illness. "This is what doctors are supposed to be looking for," Johnson told jurors.

"I do have some questions about the Davis police ... maybe they have a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross," said Schick, wondering if the system tied their hands despite the alarming red flags Marsh's therapists had raised before the murders. "Although I'm wondering if the Davis police would act differently now having made that error?"

Schools are in a key position to identify and intervene early to help steer mentally ill youth toward resources and treatment, those behind the Project AWARE grant say. Could things have turned out differently in Marsh's case?

"We would have done everything to prevent a crime that like," Davis High School Principal William Brown said. "Right now we're moving ahead."

Courtenay Tessler, who as Davis' head counselor had worked with Marsh, said the moving past the tragedy will take work. Part of that effort will be removing the stigma of mental illness so families aren't embarrassed to seek help.

"For people involved the situation, it will be part of our lives forever. You move on and you keep working and do your best. It's very hard. It's an absolute tragedy for everyone."

Killer to be sentenced Nov. 14

Schick doesn't yet know what she'll say at Marsh's sentencing hearing Nov. 14. As wrenching as it will be, she feels compelled to attend.

"I think I really have to face him. I have to figure out what value there is to every life. To figure out what I can say," she says.

If for nothing else, she wants to make sure he stays behind bars as long as possible; Cabral says he'll recommend 52 years to life.

During his preliminary hearing, Marsh almost looked drugged, Schick said -- until they read the part of his statement recounting the crime. His eyes lit up in the courtroom.

"He was kind of like, 'Yeah!' We were afraid that it's kind of like he's a tiger that has a taste for human blood, that it's too late," she says. "I don't know if he's even salvageable. It's a terrible thing. That's my spiritual dilemma."

Contact reporter Elizabeth Roberts at (209) 546-8268 or eroberts@recordnet.com. Follow her on Twitter @eroberts209

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