Confinement hearing set for David Peterson

Mental patient jailed at Whiting Forensic killed 9-year-old in 1989

MIDDLETOWN — State officials are expected to continue the maximum-security confinement of a psychiatric hospital patient who killed a 9-year-old girl after walking away from a state treatment facility.

The state Psychiatric Security Review Board has scheduled a hearing on David Peterson for Nov. 3. The board must review his mental health and confinement every two years. An agenda for the meeting indicates there are no requests to change his confinement conditions.

Peterson wandered off the grounds of a low-security section of Connecticut Valley Hospital in July 1989 and stabbed Jessica Short of Wallingford to death at a city street fair.

Peterson, 37, who was on an eight-hour pass after being ordered to CVH on a 15-year sentence in May 1968, stabbed 9-year-old Jessica Short repeatedly in the head and chest with a large hunting knife, according to news reports.

The stabbing took place on Main Street during one of the city’s annual summer sidewalk sales that routinely drew thousands to the downtown area. Peterson grabbed Short after she walked out of the F. W. Woolworth store at 428-432 Main St., (now Irreplaceable Artifacts) and attacked her with the knife before a passerby and two officers pulled him off her, press reports said.

The Facebook page In Loving Memory of Jessica Short posts links to periodic articles on the case.

Peterson had been found guilty by reason of insanity on assault and burglary charges, Martha Lewis, executive director of the state Psychiatric Security Review Board, said in a July 29, 1989, Associated Press story.

Peterson was acquitted of murder and escape March 30, 1990, in the case. According to the New York Times story, Peterson, “a chronic paranoid schizophrenic with a history of mental illness and violence since his youth,” chose his victim randomly.

When he was sentenced in 1990, the New York Times, reported, Peterson had spent 15 years in mental institutions and was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1971 and 1988 in other stabbing attacks and was committed to state hospitals for those crimes.

“Mr. Peterson told the police that he had killed Miss Short to take revenge on his doctors because they wouldn’t change his medication,” the Times reported.

He was committed to state care for a 70-year term that expires in 2060. He’s currently being treated at the maximum-security Whiting Forensic Division of Connecticut Valley Hospital.