Expert details Pittsburgh synagogue shooter's troubled childhood 'laden with trauma'

Time and again, Robert Bowers’ mother was told her young son needed help.

When he was an infant, both parents threatened to kill him.

When he was a toddler, his speech regressed so much he stopped talking altogether.

When he had a rash as a young boy, a doctor thought he had herpes.

In first grade, he was referred to a school psychologist.

In fourth grade, his teacher raised concerns about his emotional well-being.

In eighth grade, he was referred to a school psychologist.

At age 13, he was released from a nine-month inpatient hospitalization.

At age 16, he attempted suicide.

At age 17, after another suicide attempt, he was hospitalized for two months.

Time and again, an expert said Thursday, Bowers’ mother never followed through.

“There’s a real pattern of Robert’s mother having a really difficult time of hearing she needs to do something,” Dr. Katherine Porterfield testified.

Porterfield, the first witness called by Bowers’ defense attorneys in the sentence-selection phase of his trial, spent most of the day testifying. A clinical psychologist and expert in trauma, she conducted a psychosocial history of Bowers, interviewing 17 people and reviewing more than 21,000 pages of documents, including medical and mental health records, school report cards, Children and Youth Services records and court files in putting together a history of him and his family dating back several generations.

Porterfield’s conclusion?

“Robert Bowers had multiple, severe and chronic traumatic life events and circumstances that put him at risk for the development of serious mental illness,” she said. “Time and again, Robert did not get the care and intervention he needed, and his mental health deteriorated over the course of his life.”

A jury found Bowers guilty of killing 11 people and wounding four police officers on Oct. 27, 2018, at the Squirrel Hill synagogue that housed the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha, Dor Hadash and New Light congregations whose members were worshipping at the synagogue that day.

Killed were Rose Mallinger, 97; Bernice Simon, 84, and Sylvan Simon, 86; brothers David Rosenthal, 54, and Cecil Rosenthal, 59; Dan Stein, 71; Irv Younger, 69; Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; Joyce Fienberg, 75; Melvin Wax, 87; and Richard Gottfried, 65.

Early this week, the government called 22 witnesses to provide victim impact testimony in an attempt to convince the jury that Bowers should be put to death for his crimes.

The defense is seeking a sentence of life in prison with no chance for release, arguing that their client’s troubled childhood and history of mental illness mean he should be spared.

Porterfield began her testimony Wednesday afternoon and will return to the stand Monday on redirect examination. Friday is an off day.

Over 2½ hours of cross-examination by the government Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicole Vasquez Schmitt attempted to impugn the defense expert’s methods and credibility, questioning everything from her lack of citations in her 23-page report to her participation in community theater.

But on direct examination by Assistant Public Defender Elisa Long, the defense attempted to illustrate what Porterfield called “an extraordinary amount of adversity” in Bowers’ childhood.

Born to a mentally ill mother and an abusive father who committed suicide when Bowers was 7, his childhood was “laden with trauma, neglect and adversity,” the witness said.

“This is a seriously ill person with severe symptoms of mental illness, who needs treatment,” Porterfield said.

Everywhere he turned in his younger years, Bowers found abusive or mentally ill caretakers, she said. He responded with language regression at 20 months old, repeated emotional problems at school and five reported suicide attempts in the span of seven years.

During early childhood, Porterfield told the jury that the defendant’s mother divorced his father, and soon after married another man who was mentally ill and violent and later convicted of child sexual abuse.

In 1981, his mother, who had trouble holding a job, began dating another man, who quickly moved in to her one-room apartment.

Bowers began sleeping on a pallet in the kitchen, Porterfield said.

His report cards in elementary school, the witness said, showed a student with some aptitude, testing in the 98th and 99th percentile on standardized tests for language and science.

But those same report cards showed increasing deterioration at school. His grades began to slip, and he became more and more absent — missing 31 days in seventh grade.

At age 10, Bowers threatened to throw himself off a bluff by his house and was preoccupied with suicide, Porterfield said.

It was at age 13 that he had his first psychiatric hospitalization after having a homicidal incident with his mother in which he sprayed an inflammable liquid on her and attempted to light it.

He was held at McKeesport Hospital for 2½ weeks. When he was told he would be moved to a longer, in-patient facility, Bowers was placed in four-point restraints — leather cuffs connecting his wrists and ankles to a metal-framed bed — for 24 hours, Porterfield said.

Porterfield showed jurors the psychiatric facility’s hour-by-hour record of his behavior.

“This is a document of a difficult time for a boy, a difficult thing to have go through,” she said.

He then moved to Southwood Hospital where they said Bowers had “poor social skills, poor peer relationships” and was depressed. He had “oppositional and bizarre behavior.”

At Southwood, a social worker reported, “Mother interviews oftentimes will minimize the significance or dangerousness of Robert’s behavior. There appear to be some histrionic traits with mother’s interactions.”

He was at Southwood for 41 days.

After that, still in need of residential care, Bowers moved to the Bradley Center, where, Porterfield said, he showed improvement.

He went to school in the community and had good grades and excellent attendance and was exhibiting a “satisfactory to good attitude.”

But when he was finally released in June 1986, and his mother was told to seek follow-up outpatient treatment for her son, she did not.

Adult life of gunman

Bowers worked at the Potomac Bakery in Dormont for nearly 15 years, but held down little other work, Porterfield said. While at the bakery, Bowers also took part-time jobs at McDonald’s, a gas station and a TV store. He briefly delivered pizza.

After stealing $1,300 from the bakery, the owner fired him and evicted him from the apartment above the shop, she said.

Bowers became suicidal and put a double-barreled shotgun in his mouth, according to a police report Porterfield cited. He called police before pulling the trigger and was taken to St. Clair Hospital, where he stayed for three days.

Although follow-up care was recommended, he did not seek it, Porterfield said.

Bowers lived with his grandfather, Lloyd Jenkins, from 2004 until 2014, when Lloyd died, and the family sold the house.

While there, Bowers slept in a recliner in an unfinished basement, Porterfield said. He had “a minimal ability to be in life as a functional person.”

In 2006, Bowers saw a physician and told him he could not hold a job because of “tremendous depression, anxiety and social anxieties,” Porterfield said.

The doctor prescribed Effexor, an antidepressant, and told Bowers to see a therapist. He did not.

In 2008, Bowers studied at an Indianapolis driving school, got a commercial driver’s license and became a truck driver. At one point, he had no home and lived in his truck.

Bowers had no support system, Porterfield said.

“Robert’s family, those I met, loved him,” she said. “But they had a lot of problems … and they could not mobilize to help him.”

On cross-examination, the government attempted to show the jury that Bowers was exaggerating his mental illness — including whether the incidents at age 10 and in 2004 were actual suicide attempts or suicidal gestures.

Vasquez Schmitt questioned Porterfield’s findings on the defendant’s mother, whom she interviewed three times. In her notes, the witness wrote down that the woman was impaired as a parent, emotionally, cognitively and socially.

“Yet you used her as a major source for your report?” Vasquez Schmitt asked.

“Yes,” the witness answered.

The government also questioned Porterfield about why she did not interview the defendant’s stepfather, who has been in his life since 1981.

Porterfield said she believed Bowers’ mother was the best direct source of information. She noted, though, that his stepfather was present when she interviewed the defendant’s mother.

The prosecutor spent a great deal of time questioning the witness about why she chose not to interview the defendant in creating her report.

Porterfield said repeatedly that she was asked to compile a full psychosocial history of Bowers’ life, not make a clinical diagnosis. If that had been requested, she said, she would have spent a great deal of time with the defendant.

Porterfield told Vasquez Schmitt that she has spent about 200 hours working on the case for the defense and is being paid $350 per hour.

The government also asked Porterfield about her previous work with Second City Theater, where the witness once performed and sometimes teaches.

On redirect, Long, the defense attorney, asked: “There’s nothing fictional about what you’re telling us here today is there?”

“No, there’s not,” Porterfield answered.

The prosecutor repeatedly tried to minimize the witness’s conclusions about Bowers’ adult life, including claims that he lived in isolation and was barely functional.

Porterfield admitted that she interviewed at least one person who said they had been friends with Bowers in adulthood and described going out to dinner and the movies and playing chess together.

Vasquez Schmitt also wondered how Bowers could have held a job for 14 years at the bakery, and later worked as a home health aide, and then drove a long-haul tractor-trailer without being functional.

Porterfield noted that the defendant only stayed in the home health aide job for several months and left his trucking job repeatedly. She agreed, though, that Bowers showed he could be responsible and functional in performing that work.

The government also questioned the witness about her findings that Bowers scored a 7 of 10 on an inventory of Adverse Childhood Experiences. Porterfield found that he had suffered chronic traumatic experiences of emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, mental illness in the household, domestic violence, divorce or paternal death, and substance abuse in the household.

An earlier prosecution expert, psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, did the same assessment of Bowers and found he had only four of the experiences.

“I don’t know why Dr. Dietz only found four,” Porterfield said, noting that Bowers self-reported to Dietz. “There’s a lot of reasons people don’t report things that were bad in their childhood.”

She listed embarrassment, humiliation, shame, stigma and fragmented memory caused by trauma.

The defense on Thursday briefly called Bowers’ paternal aunt to testify about some of the traumatic history on that side of his family tree.

Deanna Bowers, who was married to Wendell Bowers — the defendant’s uncle — said she met him only once when he was 8 and traveled to California to visit his grandmother.

Wendell Bowers was one of six living as a child in New Castle, Lawrence County. His father, Norman, abused the children, sometimes beating them with a belt, especially the sons, she testified.

Around 1964 or 1965, their mother, Anne Marie Bowers, left her husband and moved with her children to California. They divorced shortly after.

“She had enough,” Deanna said. “She was concerned for the safety of her children.”

Deanna met her husband in 1973. She said that by that time, some in the family already had stopped communicating with Randall Bowers, the defendant’s father. Wendell, in particular, hated Randall, she said. The only person to acknowledge the young Robert Bowers as family was his grandmother.

On cross-examination, Deanna Bowers said one of the other brothers was mentally abusive to his wife, and that he stopped speaking to her husband.

Wendell, who died in 2019, she told the prosecution, lived a productive life and contributed to his community, including serving as president of their local Rotary club.