Terry Sturgis back in court, pleads insanity in beating death of son
Posted: Dec 2, 2011 1:58 AM EDT | Updated: Nov 6, 2014 2:48 PM EDT
SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Terry Sturgis, who is accused of beating his son to death last month, was back in a South Bend court Thursday.
Prosecutors hit Sturgis with 11 new counts of child abuse and neglect.
Sturgis' attorney also filed some new paperwork claiming Sturgis was insane when he beat 10-year-old Tramelle Sturgis to death.
Last month Sturgis was charged with the murder of his 10-year-old son Tramelle after he admitted to the cops he had tortured the boy for hours before he finally died from the brutal beating.
Sturgis claims that because he is on kidney dialysis twice a week, his mental state changed, which lead to the beatings of all three of his boys.
ABC 57 sat down with a doctor to talk about the symptoms patients with renal or kidney failure may have during the course of their treatment and found that in severe cases people's mental state can change.
"They can become confused, very fatigued, tired and sometimes what we call delirious," says Dr. Matthew Teters, MD.
Kidney dialysis cleans the blood of toxins and it is when those toxins build up in the blood that someone can start experiencing symptoms.
Teters says in most cases people function normally if being treated on a regular basis like Sturgis has been.
Police date the child abuse back almost two years and the new battery charges filed today are for all three of his boys, not just Tramelle Strugis.
We asked the question, is confusion and delusion enough to cause someone to brutally torture their kids?
"It's possible for a patient to become violent, although that is not the common presentation of renal failure...Yes, I would say it's unlikely," says Teters.
Terry Sturgis will be back in court on Dec. 20. That is when a judge will appoint three different doctors to evaluate his mental and physical state.