First, I have to apologize for not posting this story sooner. The story broke at the start of October, and I’m only now getting to it. October has been a busy month, and this is the first chance I’ve had to write about it.
Anyway, here’s a name I haven’t thought about in years: John Odgren. On January 19th, 2007, Odgren, a 16-year-old student at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Sudbury, Massachusetts, took a kitchen knife to school and stabbed 15-year-old James Alenson to death in the school’s bathroom.
James Alenson was a kid that Odgren didn’t even know. According to the court record, a student nearby heard Alenson plead, “What are you doing? Stop that. Ow, ow. You’re hurting me,” and then spotted a few drops of blood at the foot of the stall. Alenson died from stab wounds to his heart, left lung, and liver, and when that witness looked in, Odgren was sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees, asking someone to get help and saying he had just gone crazy.
Odgren’s lawyers never really fought the idea that he commited the murder. At trial, they admitted he killed Alenson and argued instead that he wasn’t criminally responsible, claiming that his long-term psychiatric issues, depression combined with Asperger’s syndrome, left him psychotic at the time.
Prosecutors told a very different story, and a Middlesex Superior Court jury sided with them in 2010, convicting him of first-degree murder on theories of deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty. That meant an automatic life sentence. His attorneys kept at it for years afterward, arguing that his juvenile brain hadn’t fully developed and that he never should have been tried and sentenced as an adult, but the Supreme Judicial Court shot that down in 2019.
For anyone who hasn’t run across the term in a while, a quick note on that diagnosis. Asperger’s syndrome was long given to people with social and communication difficulties who were otherwise typically developing, and it has since been folded into the broader umbrella now called Autism Spectrum Disorder. Doctors don’t use “Asperger’s” as a standalone label anymore, even though plenty of people still do.
As I said at the time, hanging a murder on Asperger’s does a real disservice to everyone who lives on the spectrum. When a defense lawyer stands up in court and essentially argues that a kid’s autism is the reason he picked up a knife, the takeaway for the average person is that anyone on the spectrum could be a ticking time bomb.
The overwhelming majority of people with ASD will never hurt a soul, and they don’t deserve to get lumped in with a killer just because his lawyers needed a theory. A kid who brings a knife to school with deliberate premeditation doesn’t get to blame a diagnosis for a choice.
It was a popular move in the 2000s, and not just for Odgren. Defense teams in other school-related cases of that era reached for the same diagnosis, hoping to turn a calculated act into a medical misfortune. None of them were successful.
Which brings us to now. Odgren is 36 years old, and he’s asking to go free. He’s scheduled to appear before the Massachusetts Parole Board in Natick for an initial hearing on November 10th, though a state hearing calendar lists the same case on November 12th.
Odgren is currently sitting in North Central Correctional Institution in Gardner, a medium- and minimum-security prison. Because he was a juvenile when he killed Alenson, the state will provide him with a lawyer and money for experts at the hearing. I’ll be watching to see whether the board buys the old Asperger’s story.
Meanwhile, James Alenson’s family set up a scholarship fund in his name in 2010, the year Odgren was convicted. James was a kid who wore a New England Patriots jersey from August through January, managed his own fantasy football team, and loved the holidays and being with his family. None of that comes with a parole hearing.
Odgren wants a second chance. James never got a first one.
(Source)
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