Waking nightmare
By: JAMIE REID and DEE DIXON , The Enterprise 04/17/2004
BEAUMONT - A 27-year-old Beaumont man, once confined to a mental hospital for killing his sister in 1996, has now been charged with killing his girlfriend's 5-year-old child early Friday.
Scott Eslinger/The Enterprise
Family friend John Kelly, 51, of Beaumont offers comfort to Kathy Odoms, 30, outside Memorial Hermann Baptist Beaumont Hospital on Friday afternoon.
Kenneth Lee Pierott, Jr., of Beaumont, was arraigned in Baytown Friday on a charge of capital murder, accused of killing Tre-Deven Odoms, whose body was reportedly found in an oven at the boy's home.
Pierott, who did not live at the home, was transferred to Beaumont Friday night from Baytown, where he was arrested earlier in the day.
As the sun was rising over the rented, two-bedroom house on Amarillo Street in the quiet South Park neighborhood, a horror was about to dawn on 30-year-old Kathy Jo Odoms.
Relatives say Tre-Deven's mother awoke about 6:45 a.m. because she felt hot and smelled gas. Her boyfriend, Pierott, was pacing around her bedroom and ordered Odoms to go back to sleep, according to Odoms's mother, Kathy Scott.
Instead, she went to the kitchen, where she found three stove burners alight and turned them off, her mother said.
Photo provided by the Odoms family Tre-Deven Odoms, who was around age 1 at the time this photograph was taken, was described as a happy child who loved crawfish and basketball.
She then went to check on her two children.
Her youngest son, a 2-year-old who is Pierott's son, was still asleep.
But 5-year-old Tre-Deven, Odoms's son from a previous relationship and a happy child who loved basketball and crawfish, was missing.
"[You] won't have to worry about taking him to school no more," relatives say Pierott told Odoms as she searched the house.
Odoms returned to the kitchen - where she found her son curled up in a fetal position inside the stove with his head resting in his hand, Scott said.
Odoms called Beaumont Police about 7 a.m. and they arrived about five minutes later.
Police would only say the boy died of asphyxiation. They would not confirm whether the oven was hot or that the child was inside, but they said the Ogden Elementary kindergartner had no markings on his body.
Results from a Friday afternoon autopsy are pending, police said. The oven was removed by police.
Scott Eslinger/The Enterprise Kathy Odoms, 30, of Beaumont clutches a teddy bear as she is led away from Memorial Hermann Baptist Hospital on Friday afternoon by her stepfather, Thomas Scott of Jasper.
During her search for Tre-Deven, Odoms heard Pierott drive away in her white Ford Contour, Scott said.
The car was soon found at Pierott's mother's home in the 1000 block of Campus, according to police. A SWAT team surrounded then searched the home, but Pierott was not there.
Instead, he was found about 9:21 a.m. at his father's house 90 miles away in Houston's North Shore area, said Capt. Jack Hagee of Harris County Constable Precinct 3.
Authorities were called to the home on a complaint that a mental patient was refusing to take medicine. When police arrived, Pierott's father told police he "thought his son had been involved with killing a child," Hagee said Friday.
Pierott was arrested without incident on misdemeanor traffic warrants issued in Baytown. Police say he lived at an apartment in the 5700 block of Martin Luther King Parkway and was reportedly unemployed.
Scott Eslinger/The Enterprise Kathy Scott, 46, of Jasper as she talks outside Memorial Hermann Baptist Hospital on Friday afternoon about the death of her grandson, Tre-Deven Odoms.
Before long, Houston and Beaumont lawmen had connected Pierott to Tre-Deven's killing.
Kathy Jo Odoms was taken to Hermann Memorial Baptist Beaumont Hospital, where she was examined and released Friday. When she left the hospital with relatives, she was clutching a white teddy bear.
Pierott has a history of violence and mental illness.
In 1996, high on marijuana laced with embalming fluid, he killed his disabled sister by smashing her head with a metal dumbbell.
Psychiatrists diagnosed Pierott as paranoid schizophrenic. But Beaumont psychiatrist Dr. Edward Gripon wrote that the illness was in "substantial remission" with psychotherapy and antipsychotic drugs.
Scott Eslinger/The Enterprise This is the Beaumont home that Kathy Odoms, 30, shared with her 2- and 5-year-old sons.
Pierott was judged not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to psychiatric facility Vernon State Hospital in July 1998, then Rusk State Hospital in August. He was released in October, with "no indication of psychosis," his doctor at Rusk wrote at the time.
In 1999, after returning to Beaumont, he forged a check and was fined $750 and placed on community supervision for three years, according to court documents.
Three years later, in 2002, court records show that he hit Odoms with his hand and was intoxicated or under the influence of an intoxicating substance that day.
Later in 2002, he was ordered to have no contact with Odoms after a family assault episode. However, Odoms said she wanted to continue having a relationship with him and to let him freely see their child, according to court documents.
Earlier this month, Odoms sought child support from Pierott, court papers say.
Reporters ANGELA MACIAS, JACQUELINE LANE and CHRISTINE RAPPLEYE added to this report.
Reach this reporter at:
(409) 833-3311, ext. 428
©The Beaumont Enterprise 2004
And the alledged Prep.....
Suspect went in psychiatric hospital after killing sister
By: JAMIE REID , The Enterprise 04/17/2004
Kenneth Lee Pierott Jr., the prime suspect in the Friday murder of his girlfriend's child, was released in 1998 from a Texas psychiatric hospital where he'd been treated after bludgeoning his sister to death.
Kenneth Pierott is accused of killing his girlfriend's 5-year-old son, reportedly by stuffing him inside an oven in her Beaumont home.
Kenneth Lee Pierott Jr., the prime suspect in the Friday murder of his girlfriend's child, was released in 1998 from a Texas psychiatric hospital where he'd been treated after bludgeoning his sister to death two years before.
Pierott, 27, now stands accused of stuffing his girlfriend's 5-year-old son into an oven, where the child died of asphyxiation, a Beaumont police spokeswoman said Friday. Capital murder charges were filed late Friday.
But it's not the first time Pierott has faced murder charges, according to court records.
In December 1996, Pierott killed his 25-year-old sister - bed-ridden with cerebral palsy - by whacking her head with a heavy metal dumbbell. Police soon found him in a nearby apartment, covered in blood and body tissue, wearing only shoes.
Before the killing, Pierott told his mother he was God and had recently smoked a drug called "wet" - marijuana laced with embalming fluid, according to police reports.
Shortly after his arrest, he told police he had been fighting with the Devil and he killed his sister because she had been corrupted by evil relatives.
"This man was frankly psychotic at the time he was initially arrested," according to a 1997 psychiatric evaluation by Dr. Edward B. Gripon.
In the same evaluation, Pierott was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Gripon wrote that the illness was in "substantial remission" thanks to psychotherapy and antipsychotic drugs.
Pierott was declared legally insane and was sent to Vernon State Hospital for evaluation in July 1998.
Two Vernon psychiatrists agreed Pierott was psychotic and needed to be in a maximum-security hospital, according to court records. One of the doctors checked a box that said, "is likely to cause serious harm to others."
In August, he was transferred to Rusk State Hospital, but less than three months later, doctors declared him safe to release.
"It is the opinion of the patient's attending physician that continued in-patient treatment is no longer needed," former Rusk State Hospital Superintendent Harold R. Parrish Jr. wrote at the time.
"He has reached maximum hospital benefit," Rusk physician Harry Thompson wrote in a medical examination on Oct. 12, 1998.
Pierott returned to Beaumont, where he was treated locally by Spindletop Mental Health and Mental Retardation. In 2000, social workers noted that he lived with his mother and briefly held a janitorial job, but was otherwise unemployed.
In 2002, Pierott was taking his medications and his schizophrenia was in remission, according to court documents.
But by October 2002, he was in trouble again. Pierott received a one-year deferred sentence for domestic violence on Aug. 23, 2002, according to other case files. He had been ordered by the court to have no contact with Kathy Jo Odoms, his girlfriend and his victim. (See main story.)
No further court documents about Pierott's treatment or his sister's murder case were released Friday.
Reporter Jacqueline Lane contributed to this report.
Reach this reporter at:
(409) 833-3311, ext. 428
©The Beaumont Enterprise 2004
