More relatives, survivors and a psychologist testify in synagogue massacre trial

More victims’ family members as well as survivors of the Oct. 27, 2018, synagogue massacre testified on Wednesday, filling in some of the empty spaces that remain around the words “11 people murdered” and “six more injured.”

On the third day of the long-running trial’s third phase, in which the jury will decide whether to sentence the shooter, Robert Bowers, to death, more spouses and parents and children and friends described the loved ones they’ve lost, and survivors described debilitating physical and mental issues.

The prosecution also showed many photos, videos and X-ray images that made for such powerful exhibits that Judge Robert Colville at one point reminded everyone to not show visible reactions, but rather leave the courtroom at Downtown’s federal courthouse if need be, so jurors can continue to do their job without prejudice.

Five of the government’s six witnesses had testified previously, while the defense called a single, first-time-at-this-trial witness: clinical psychologist Katherine Porterfield, Ph.D. The trauma expert testified that, based on her detailed psychosocial history, the defendant experienced trauma from the time he was in the womb and came from a family wracked with trauma including drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness.

The prosecution’s first witness Wednesday morning was Sharyn Stein, 76, of Squirrel Hill, the widow of Dan Stein, whom she described as a solid husband and father, worker and community volunteer who was devout and active in his Jewish faith. The day he was shot at the Tree of Life synagogue building started as a normal Saturday in a year that was both normal and extraordinary for their family. Shown was a snapshot of her with “Danny,” as she called him, on a trip to California in July 2018. Also shown were photos of him in his Pirates hat — Pittsburgh sports was one of his joys — holding his grandson who had been born that March and who she said put her husband “over the moon.”

Asked about how losing him has affected her, she said, “My world has fallen apart. … We were together for 46 years. And part of me is not there now.” 

The Steins’ son, Joseph Stein, became emotional when he recounted how his dad once came to his workplace before a ballgame and showed his boss a photo he kept in his wallet of Joseph in first grade. He said he still tries to be like his dad, who he said also was extremely close to his sister, Leigh. He especially misses his dad on days such as Wednesday — his own birthday.

“I never really realized what true loss is,” he said, “until that person is not there anymore.” 

Pittsburgh police Officer Tim Matson survived being shot multiple times but was left with injuries so serious that he’s had 25 surgeries and has another scheduled; he didn’t make it home from the hospitals and a friend’s house for more than 20 weeks and didn’t get back to work (modified duty) for two years. He still can’t sleep in a bed or without medications, and he cries daily but has learned that’s OK at “happy school,” as he calls therapy.

At one point, Matson said, he was in such a dark place that he considered suicide, but when he stepped outside, he was inspired to keep going by a weed that had sprouted in an angler’s minnow bucket, and that reminded him of his own strength and support system. He tucked in some soil and placed the plant on his porch.

Michele Rosenthal talked about her brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, who delighted their Squirrel Hill neighbors including city firefighters. She shared videos of “the boys,” as they were known, leading a service for other people with special needs in Tree of Life’s Previn Chapel, an annual tradition that delighted them. Asked about losing them both, she said that words such as “devastated, heartbroken, traumatized … they don’t scratch the surface.” Also played was a video of their father talking about the loss that time has not healed: “Our hearts are empty every single day.” 

Andrea Wedner also survived the attack but watched her mother be shot and die, and herself was left with arm and hand injuries that left her unable to return the job she loved as a dental hygienist. She said she can barely brush or floss her teeth. She elaborated on a favorite photo of her mom at a family wedding wearing a purple dress. “She just looks beautiful in this picture. Such a happy day. We were all just so happy.” 

Daniel Leger, who also was shot and thought he was going to die on some synagogue stairs, talked about his many surgeries and excruciating complications, having to get a colostomy, and still having so much shrapnel in his body that the white bits on X-rays look “like a night sky, like a snowstorm.”

He recounted how he nonetheless resolved to walk in to visit Matson in his nearby hospital room and did it — with the help of a hospital worker with a wheelchair who got him to the door. “I didn’t tell him that.”

He also said how it feels to have lost his dear friend Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz in the attack.

Leger, too, battles dark thoughts and daily pain, constant reminders of that day nearly five years ago. “I just feel diminished,” he said. “I feel very diminished.”

The defense, which had no questions for any of these witnesses, had its witness talk about difficulties the defendant experienced as a child, and started by establishing the expertise of Porterfield. She explained how she was commissioned to create the psychosocial history that involved her reviewing some 21,000 pages of documents and interviewing 17 people, although not the defendant. She summarized her findings in a 26-page report that she spent two hours of the afternoon explaining. She stopped for the day at the point in the report where the defendant was still about 5 years old.

In part that’s because she’d researched his family tree including his maternal grandmother, who was put in an orphanage with her eight siblings — a family that Porterfield showed, through hospital and police and other records, experienced “a lot of mental illness and trauma and abuse.”

She said the defendant’s own parents once threatened to kill the boy, and his father tried to kill himself after his discharge from a psychiatric hospital. The defendant’s mother was by her own admission not a good mother, had only part-time and low-paying jobs, and had relationships with a number of different men including a second husband who was later charged and convicted for child molestation.

In fact, Porterfield said, by the time the defendant was about 5, he had experienced seven of 10 standard adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, defined in part as “severe repetitive traumatic stressors [that] cause changes in children’s stress response systems … alter children’s developing brains and nervous systems,” and “are linked to physical diseases, mental illness and violence.” 

For a child, “This is what we would call an extraordinary dose of trauma and risk,” Porterfield said. “It’s very hard for that child to develop normally.” 

The trial, in which testimony began on May 30, resumes at 9 a.m. Thursday and is expected to continue at least for next week.

Related story: Resources are available to ease trauma during synagogue shooting trial.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.