A MAN WITH A HISTORY
Prosecutors say man killed retired couple in Mount Dora
of mental illness has been deemed competent to stand trial for the 2009 double murder of a retired Mount Dora couple.
A man with a history of mental illness, accused of fatally stabbing a retired couple in Mount Dora in 2009, has been deemed competent to stand trial — more than seven years after the attack.
Jonathan Levy, 32, was moved from the Northeast Florida State Hospital, a mental health facility near Jacksonville, to the Lake County Jail on Monday. His arraignment is scheduled for Sept. 19.
Levy was 24 when he allegedly attacked Philip Heintzen, 80, and his wife Sandra Heintzen, 69, as they walked to their car in a Target parking lot on April 4, 2009.
Philip Heintzen died of his injuries 11 days later. Sandra Heintzen died on what would have been her husband’s 81st birthday, July 22, 2009. Medical examiners said both deaths were homicides.
Levy did not know the couple.
“This was a random act by the suspect, and only he knows why he did it,” Mount Dora police Chief T. Randall Scoggins said in 2009.
The Heintzens were married for 50 years. Philip had worked as the chief financial officer for a shoe company, and Sandra Heintzen was an executive at McDonald’s.
They moved from Wisconsin to a seniors’ community in Leesburg in the 1990s and spent most of their time enjoying each others’ company.
“This was their dream — a quiet little lakefront view in Florida,” their son P.J. said in 2009. He declined to comment about the revived charges this week.
When they were attacked, Philip Heintzen was opening the car door for his wife. Levy allegedly lunged at him with two butcher knives, records show.
Sandra Heintzen hit Levy with her cane, trying to get him to stop. He yelled an expletive and attacked her, knocking her down.
Levy, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was repeatedly deemed unfit for prosecution because of mental illness in the years since. In February, five years after Levy was first declared incompetent for trial, a judge dismissed two first-degree murder charges against him in accordance with state law.
The judge left the door open for future prosecution, saying state attorneys could revive the charges if Levy’s condition improved. Florida statute allows for that, too.
Six months later, Levy is back in the Lake County Jail.
Neither public defender Morris Carranza nor prosecutor Richard Buxman would say what about Levy’s condition has changed, citing his right to medical privacy.
Carranza said he saw Levy on Wednesday morning but did not discuss his condition in detail. Levy is being held in the jail’s general population, he said.
“The hospital that he was in has found him competent to proceed,” Carranza said.
In the past, the Heintzens’ son has said he wanted to see Levy face charges for his parents’ deaths. In September, during a court hearing where Levy was again ruled incompetent, P.J. Marx said it was hard for him to see Levy.
“I don’t know that I can put that into words,” said Marx, 49, who lives near Sarasota.
It’s uncommon for a defendant’s competency to be restored many years after a crime, but not unprecedented.
In 1998, Bobby McGee of Dunedin was accused of fatally stabbing his wife, Helene Ball McGee. McGee, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, was deemed incompetent for 16 years.
Then his doctors found a combination of long-acting medications that kept him more lucid for four to six weeks at a time, said Richard Ripplinger, one of the state attorneys who prosecuted the case. While he was on the medications, McGee’s competency was restored. The court scheduled hearings to fit his medication schedule.
McGee was kept in a state hospital during most of the proceedings. There he could be forced to take his medication, a power the Pinellas County Jail did not have, Ripplinger said.
“When they started having the subsequent evaluations for legal sanity, all those were done at the state hospital,” Ripplinger said.
Even if defendants are capable of understanding and participating in court proceedings, their attorneys can still try to mount an insanity defense, arguing that defendants did not know right from wrong and could not understand the consequences of their actions at the time of the crime, he added.
“It’s probably easier to prove that somebody is incompetent than to prove that someone doesn’t know right from wrong, in my opinion,” Ripplinger said.
McGee was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in late 2015. He committed suicide while in custody in January.