Mom’s love for killer son remains ‘unconditional’

Janice House says 38-year-old needs help not prison

Janice House pushes her walker out of the courtroom where her son is under heavy guard, his arms and legs shackled. “He needs a haircut,” she says. Those are the words of a woman who loves her child unconditionally. Who chooses to see the good in him and thinks of him not as a convicted killer, but as the boy she raised.

“He has a good heart. I love him. I miss him,” she says simply.

On Friday, his 38th birthday, Darryl House was ordered by a judge to undergo a psychiatric assessment to determine if he was not criminally responsible when he knifed a man to death. As always, Janice, 53, is at the courthouse. Darryl is mentally ill and extremely violent. The court has struggled for months to determine if he ought to be in prison or a hospital.

“In the hospital, to get help,” his mom weighs in.

The court has also had to decide if he is fit to represent himself in court, as he wants to. At various times during the judicial process, psychiatrists have found him fit and unfit. Right now, he is fit.

Most importantly, the court must determine if he was capable of understanding what he was doing when he stabbed Richard Crowder completely through his neck at a crack house on Jan. 24, 2016.

He was charged with second-degree murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Sometimes in court he seems lucid, other times he makes no sense at all. He can be quiet or prone to angry outbursts. Once, he slapped his lawyer across the face in the courtroom.

Janice says she is Cayuga and Darryl’s father was Onondaga.

Darryl was born premature and began life on Six Nations reserve. He has a younger brother.

As a child, Darryl loved to play outdoors and he excelled at lacrosse. He was “a good, happy kid.” But he never liked school, his mom says.

He acted up in class — “he’d poke a kid” — and had trouble concentrating. He was put on Ritalin, according to Janice, but “it made him like a zombie.”

Darryl started smoking weed at a young age. When he was nine, the family moved off the reserve and into downtown Hamilton and he began to spin out of control.

He got in with the wrong crowd, his mom says, and started drinking and doing hard drugs.

Janice says leaving the reserve was a mistake. He was better there, surrounded by his own community.

At 10 or 11, Darryl witnessed a car crash in which his uncle was killed and his father seriously injured. Janice believes it had a devastating impact on her son and wonders if it plagues him to this day.

“He probably imagines that all the time,” she says.

Not long after that, Darryl’s father died. Janice remarried and Darryl’s stepdad has been a constant part of his life.

By 12 or 13, Darryl was sleeping on the streets or in shelters. He was getting in fights. Eventually, he dropped out of high school. All the while, Janice never gave up. “Five times a day he’d say ‘I love you Mom,’” she recalls.

Darryl fathered two children. The eldest is about seven now, Janice says. He tried to look after them — she describes her son vacuuming and making Kraft Dinner — but “he wasn’t right in the head.”

Around the time Darryl became a dad, he started hearing voices.

“He’s always talking to someone, fighting with someone when there’s no one there.”

Several psychiatrists have suggested to the court that he has schizophrenia.

Darryl has never been violent toward her, but Janice has called police on him when he was “out of control.”

“And that makes me sad,” she says. “I love him. He’s my son. It’s unconditional.”

Susan Clairmont’s commentary appears regularly in The Spectator. sclairmont@thespec.com 905-526-3539 | @susanclairmont