According to Texas law she very well could go free if the shrinks at the state hospital deem her well enough for release. It's happened before with dire consequences for innocent people. 05:56 PM CDT on Tuesday, April 20, 2004 Associated Press HOUSTON (AP) -- A Beaumont man was formally charged with murder Tuesday for the death of a 6-year-old boy found in an oven. "Kenneth Lee Pierott, Jr. told (his brother) he placed Tre in the oven on 600 degrees and left him there all night," Sheila K. Barton, a detective with the Beaumont Police Department, said in an affidavit Tuesday. According to the court document, Pierott believed the child was "draining the life" from his 2-year-old son, Jacory, and "he needed to kill Trey so that Jacory could breathe." Preliminary autopsy results indicated the boy died of asphyxiation. He had no burn marks or visible injuries, Justice of the Peace Paul Brown said. Pierott's mother, Urestine Pierott, described her son, Kenneth, as "a sweet, young man that any mother would have trusted," but who suffers from a mental illness and isn't in his "right mind." She told The Associated Press she first realized her son was mentally ill in 1996 when he killed her oldest child. Stephanie Pierott, 25, who suffered from cerebral palsy, was fatally beaten with a dumbbell. Kenneth Pierott was found innocent by reason of insanity for her slaying and was released from a state hospital in 1998. Urestine Pierott said Tuesday she has since forgiven her son and hoped the latest case would help people understand that "mental illness is a sickness." "I don't know what went wrong, but I tell you ... it is no more his fault that he is mentally ill than it is Stephanie's fault that she had cerebral palsy," she said. Pierott fled the home of his girlfriend, Kathy Jo Odoms, shortly after 6 a.m. Friday when the woman woke up because she felt warm and smelled gas. She also is the mother of Jacory, who was in bed with her. "She started to get up and Kenneth told her to go back to sleep that she didn't have to worry about no job, daycare or ironing clothes," Barton said in the affidavit. "She got up and found the burners on the stove burning and she turned all the knobs off." Pierott later was arrested in Houston and returned to Beaumont after his father called authorities. He remained jailed Tuesday. Urestine Pierott said her son didn't get proper treatment after his release from the state hospital in 1998. She said he had not taken medication for more than a year because he had been unable to find a psychiatrist. "We don't have the money," she said, saying he was living on $584 in disability pay each month. "We just can't go here and there and get help like someone else can." Sally Walden with Spindletop Mental Health Mental Retardation Services in Beaumont said she couldn't comment specifically on Pierott's case because of privacy laws, but said a state hospital wouldn't release someone unless two doctors approved it. Walden said people who need mental health services are charged on a sliding scale and if someone didn't have the ability to pay, the treatment would be free. Of her three children, Urestine Pierott said Kenneth gave her the least trouble and helped care for the older sister he later killed. "He would change her diapers. He would calm her down and stuff when she had seizures," she said. "I feel like I put too much on him at a young age." Urestine Pierott said she has been on medication for depression since before her son's birth and partially blames herself for his problems. "Every time I'd wake up and see I was in this world, I'd just pop a pill and go back to sleep," she said. "I never thought that would affect him in any kind of way, but I guess it did." Murder charges filed in death of boy found in oven
Kenneth Lee Pierott, 27, is accused of killing Tre-Devin Odoms, who was left overnight in an oven at the boy's Beaumont home Thursday. The boy, the oldest son of Pierott's girlfriend, was found dead the next morning.