Anne Avery-Miller’s Suicide: Friends and lawyer say jail hanging was totally preventable By Anne Stanton The woman who once jokingly called herself the Britney Spears of Northern Michigan is now dead, after hanging herself in an Antrim County jail cell. Anne Avery-Miller was reviled, gossiped about, but also loved and passionately defended by friends in the little town of Elk Rapids, where she once worked as a barber. She was accused of killing her psychologically troubled 16-year-old son, Sam, who was found dead on November 7, 2007, with a gunshot wound that entered from the back of his left ear. Avery-Miller didn’t call police, but instead picked up the gun and carried it downstairs. She took pills and drank vodka in an unsuccessful attempt to kill herself. Some say that last week’s suicide of Anne Avery-Miller, 39, proved she was suffering from a guilty conscience for killing her son. But her friends and lawyer contend she was innocent, yet became deeply hopeless while she waited for months in Antrim County Jail for her murder trial. She was unable to get any free counseling and was never allowed to go outside. On Monday night of last week, Avery walked to her cell after watching TV and hanged herself with a bed sheet. She was found at 10:58 p.m., about 35 minutes after her last check. She was taken to Munson Medical Center, where family and friends surrounded her before her life support was turned off on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Zerafa.
“HANGING BY A THREAD” Deb Zerafa, Avery-Miller’s friend said she was in a world of hurt. She was very frustrated with her downstate attorney, Carl Marlinga, who was considering withdrawing as her attorney. Her trial date remained unscheduled (at Marlinga’s advice). But most significantly, a hearing was scheduled to permanently terminate her parental rights of her eight-year-old daughter on Tuesday, the day after her suicide. The state requires a disposition of parental rights within a year of a petition for neglect and abuse, which was filed after Avery-Miller became a murder suspect. Zerafa talked to Avery-Miller about the termination hearing over the weekend and again on Monday. “I told her, ‘don’t ever give up your rights.’ She said, ‘I won’t. I won’t sign anything.’” With a parental termination hearing, the parent is not allowed to communicate with the child until he or she reaches the age of 18. Avery-Miller hadn’t seen her daughter since she was jailed. Said Marlinga: “I know that was probably as crushing a weight as the possibility of being convicted, maybe even more so. Just the judgment she was a bad mother was something she could not possibly take.” “She was hanging on by a thread for all this time,” Zerafa said. “The circumstances surrounding her life were hopeless. The whole entire set of circumstances, but the thing that pushed her over the edge was facing Mother’s Day without her children.”
‘SCREAMING FOR HELP’ Zerafa, who wrote and frequently talked to Avery-Miller since she was jailed in November, said she believes a wrongful death suit should be pursued against the Antrim County Sheriff’s Department. “I have letters upon letters from her screaming for help — ‘I’m not going to make it, I need counseling, where are they? I want to die,’” she said. Darcie Pickren, also a friend, is pursuing a grievance against Antrim County Prosecutor Charlie Koop with the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. She is holding Koop responsible because he is considered chief of law enforcement for the county. “I believe whole-heartedly she was innocent, but we won’t be able to exonerate her. Why does Koop get to close the case? The daughter should be able to know if her mother was guilty or not. I really believe that. What a cop-out. If he has all this evidence against her, bring it on.” Koop didn’t return a call to the Express on Wednesday and left for vacation on Thursday. Antrim County Sheriff Daniel Bean issued a press release saying the suicide was under investigation, but did not respond to specific questions about the alleged lack of psychological care. Marlinga, who is based in Clinton Township, said that he had considered withdrawing from the case because Avery-Miller was deeply dissatisfied with how his law firm was handling the case. She wanted a trial right away, but he wanted to do a series of psychological assessments that would reflect that she might have been troubled and emotionally fragile, but not capable of killing her own child. “She wanted us to come to an early trial, and I specifically did not think it was in her best interest. What we needed, first of all, was the psychological assessment. That was extremely necessary. Once you have a trial and the jury comes back guilty, you can appeal it from here to forever, but it’s best to make sure all your ducks are in a row before you ever go to trial.”
NO COUNSELING Marlinga, who was working pro bono, said his office repeatedly asked Koop and the judge to ensure Avery-Miller received counseling. “There were motions and phone calls and letters asking for her own counselors to see her. It was decided they could see her, but she’d have to pay for it herself,” he said. Yet Avery-Miller had no money. “It was a very difficult situation. We were far away, and it seemed like pulling teeth to get what are considered to be fairly simple courtesies,” said Marlinga, who worked on the Jon Bonet/John Ramsey and O.J. Simpson cases. “Anne — even under the prosecutor’s theory — was acknowledged to have psychological difficulties. It seemed unusual it would be such a fight to get her psychological counseling. The state, whether it’s the courts or the prosecutor or the sheriff, have an obligation to provide medical care in their custody. And it includes psychological care, if symptoms indicate psychological care was needed. …What happened is just awful. It was totally preventable.” A gentleman friend, who was very close to Avery-Miller, said she just couldn’t get “any contact at all from Marlinga’s office.” After Avery-Miller’s death, he asked Joe Kosmala, who worked with Marlinga as the primary attorney in the case, the reason for their planned withdrawal—was it because Avery-Miller was so upset with them or because the suit was so expensive? “He said, no, they got a real nice letter from Anne asking they stay on. But at a partner’s meeting, they talked about how Carl Marlinga was going to be second chair at the trial, and it looked like it was going to be a three-week trial in November, which would come up at the same time as Carl’s state Senate race, and he couldn’t do it or commit to the time. Joe didn’t think he could give adequate representation alone. “I know Anne was terribly frustrated with her attorney, but she never wavered from the fact that she never shot her son. She feels responsible for being such a bad mom that her son committed suicide, but she went to her grave adamant that she never did this.”
SAM’S DEATH The facts behind the case are complicated, in part, because police did not immediately treat the house as a crime scene. For example, they never checked Sam’s hand for gunpowder. The forensic pathologist Dr. David Start has said it was improbable that right-handed Sam would shoot himself from behind his left ear, but not impossible, according to published reports. A woman came forward last November to say that Avery-Miller told her she had “killed Sammy,” while they were both at Munson’s Center One after Sam’s death. But the woman also testified that she suffered from a closed head injury, was on three medications, and was bipolar, according to published reports. Most troubling was the fact that Avery-Miller, who was in vicious, protracted legal battles with her ex-husband and ex-boyfriend, wrote in her journal about being in heaven with Sam and her young daughter. She also had written obituaries for all three of them. It appeared, on the surface, she had a plan to kill her children and then herself. Adding to local suspicions of her involvement in Sam’s death was the fact that she had fled town on January 22, 2008. Her whereabouts were unknown until February 25, when it was revealed that she had driven to Las Vegas to stay in a women’s shelter. “I’m not denying that the prosecution had a theory,” Marlinga said. “But you can obviously go into flights of fancy to escape the bitterness of this world, creating scenarios of where you are happy and you can long for that. But it doesn’t mean you would cross that huge line in this physical world and take a gun to your child. That would have been my defense at the trial. …Maybe, in some sense, Sam thought that with his own suicide, it would liberate his mom to take her own life.”
‘ALL BY HERSELF’ Despite Avery-Miller’s suicidal history, she fought against being on suicide watch, in part, because it meant getting put in solitary confinement and being stripped of everything, including her religious papers that gave her strength, Zerafa said. “She’d been in her cell – all by herself – in solitary for the longest time,” Zerafa said. “They took everything. Her socks and her underwear. She was freezing to death. They wouldn’t even give her proper clothing. They treated her as if she was a convicted murderer.” Said Marlinga: “There is no reason on God’s green earth that someone in solitary confinement should be freezing. You don’t take a person who has psychological prob-lems and subject them to cold temperatures and difficult conditions. You can have a type of confinement where a person is closely watched, kept warm and well fed. There could have been cameras on her on a regular basis. You could have done a whole bunch of things differently and this isn’t 20/20 hindsight. Everybody knew at the time, to some degree, that Anne was psychologically weakened. There were problems and suicide was a distinct, a very distinct possibility.” A wrongful death suit would allege that Avery-Miller was unconstitutionally deprived of psychological help. The 8th amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment on prisoners. A person who is sentenced to jail or prison should not have an additional unofficial “sentence” of pain imposed, said Traverse City attorney Grant Parsons, who has represented prisoners who have committed suicide, lost limbs, and died due to delayed or improper medical attention. “Inmates are entitled to adequate medical care as a Constitutional right. I have represented prisoners who died from their own hand by suicide; a man who lost his leg after literally crying for three and a half months for medical care; a mentally ill man whose anti-seizure medication was withheld and was instead given medication that causes seizures, and he died; a man who was attacked and suffered brain damage and then was denied help for two months. These cases have facts that are stranger than fiction. If you read some of these cases, it will make you doubt the fundamental nature of our nation,” he said. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from damaging a person’s property or life or liberty without due process. An inmate may not be made to suffer, in addition to serving a sentence, because that effectively is another penalty without legal process. One of the primary civil rights suits is for medical or mental health care for inmates in jails or prisons. The Supreme Court wrote an opinion many years ago, Estelle v Gamble, which held that inmates are entitled to adequate medical care as a Constitutional right, Parsons said.
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