A Bangor man seeking more unsupervised time 15 years after pushing someone out a window to his death still believes demons were controlling him at the time of the slaying.
William Hall, 44, who now lives in Augusta under the care of Riverview Psychiatric Center, appeared in court Friday for a petition to modify the times he’s allowed to leave his supervised apartment.
Hall attempted to strangle 28-year-old Melvin F. Abreu and pushed him out a second-story window, killing him on June 9, 2011, in Bangor. He escaped from Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center three weeks later and was captured in Brewer the next morning after swimming across the Penobscot River.
Hall was found not criminally responsible and later pleaded not guilty to murder and escape by reason of criminal insanity in 2014. He was committed to Riverview Psychiatric Center until he could be restored to competency.
Hall now lives in a supervised apartment and is allowed leave with oversight. He also gets up to six hours a day of unsupervised time, according to court records. He is assessed before and after any unsupervised time.
That unsupervised time was expanded to eight hours on Friday, and Hall can now work up to 24 hours a week, Judge Daniel Billings said at the Capital Judicial Center in Augusta.
The changes were modest requests and the state had no objections, Assistant Attorney General Laura Yustak said.
This is the latest in a series of modifications to Hall’s treatment plan, which started with small changes such as allowing him into the community for no more than two hours with two staff members alongside him. Those changes were made after a judge found it can be “modified without likelihood that Mr. Hall will cause injury to himself or others.”
Hall has a “profound lack of insight” and has not accepted he has a mental illness, Ann LeBlanc testified. She is an evaluator for the state’s forensic service, under the the Department of Health and Human Services.
LeBlanc was one of three members of Hall’s care to testify during a roughly hour and a half long court hearing Friday morning.
Hall will likely be living under supervision because of his unwillingness to accept his mental illness, LeBlanc said.
For years Hall would ask doctors to reduce his medications and now jokes about that, Wayne Moss, a psychiatrist at Riverview, said. Hall is compliant and takes all medications prescribed.
That’s a sign that Hall should not be in an unsupervised situation and that the current supervision is important, Billings said.
Hall doesn’t view himself as having a mental illness. Instead, he views the homicide as something that happened because he was controlled by demons that are not controlling him now, Moss said.
At the time of his plea, Hall told the judge, “I prefer not to say I threw him out the window.”
“It wasn’t me,” he added. “I was trying to fight it off when it happened — whatever you call it, God or Satan or something. I didn’t intentionally kill Abreu.”
It happened in part because Hall believed he was not in good standing with God, Moss said. Hall also talks with God, which is hard to say if it’s a delusion or not because people regularly pray, Moss added.
“What we see from Mr. Hall today is a credit not only to his psychiatric providers, but to his own willingness to make the effort in the face of things that he just doesn’t believe are so,” LeBlanc said.
In the two years Moss has treated Hall, Hall has not experienced any hallucinations that command him to do something, which is what happened in the slaying, Moss said.
“He’s not talking or acting like that now, and hasn’t been for the entire two years that I’ve known him and before,” Moss said. “He’s not talking about acting under that type of influence, or acting under that type of satanic influence. He hasn’t done anything like that.”
Hall has regular blood tests to ensure he’s taking his medications. He also has drug testing and must cooperate with any searches of himself or his home, according to court records.
Hall escaped from Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center, where he had been taken by police for an evaluation, about three weeks after Abreu’s death. It launched an intense manhunt that included the Maine State Police, the Bangor Police Department and the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department.
Hall was captured in Brewer the next morning after swimming across the Penobscot River. He has not attempted to escape since, according to court records.
Hall had three assault convictions and a disorderly conduct conviction that date back to 2000, according to previous reporting. He also was arrested in December 2009 for disorderly conduct and has four arrests listed for violating his conditions of release. He was also arrested on May 5, 2011, by Bangor police for felony assault on a police officer, assault and refusing to submit to arrest.
