Attorney Richard Miller stood in a Baltimore City courtroom Wednesday and listed reason after reason why his teenage client, Eric Price, turned to criminal activity.
Attention deficit disorder. Hyperactivity. A learning disability. Bed-wetting. Lead-paint poisoning. Teasing from other children. Delusions.
“He was seeing people in the halls of school that weren?t there,” Miller said of Price, 17, who is one of four males charged with beating Johns Hopkins Hospital employee Zach Sowers, 27, into a coma June 2 as he walked from the Canton bars. “He was hearing voices telling him to hurt others.”
To Sowers? wife, Anna, the reasons were nothing more than excuses.
“It?s unfortunate what he?s gone through, but that?s no reason to viciously beat Zach into a coma,” she said while walking outside of the courthouse.
Despite Miller?s arguments that Price should be tried in juvenile court, Circuit Judge Lynn Stewart ordered the teen to be tried as an adult Dec. 7
“Mr. Price appears to be the type of person who?s going to do what he wants to do, when he wants to do it, regardless of the effects on other people,” Stewart said.
Price, Arthur Jeter, 18, Trayvon Ramos, 16, and Wilburt Martin, 19, are charged in Sowers? beating with attempted first-degree murder, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.
The young professional remains in a vegetative state after he was found lying in a pool of blood between a parked car and a curb. He had been robbed and brutally beaten as he walked back to the newlyweds? Patterson Park home.
Sowers? friends and family have started several fundraising campaigns to help pay for the family?s high medical bills, including raising $13,000 at a simultaneous event in Canton, Federal Hill and Fells Point earlier this year.
In emotional testimony to the judge Wednesday, Anna Sowers said the crime has turned her “perfect life into a nightmare.”
“Price?s friends and family can still visit him and interact with him,” she said. “Price is conscious and alive. He can speak. Zach is unconscious and we never know if he?ll be with us tomorrow. I can visit Zach, but Zach will never speak back to me and will never again tell me he loves me.”
