According to PhillyBurbs.com, the New Jersey man who killed his mother and then stabbed an 11-year-old boy to death claiming that he was influenced by a METALLICA song about a boy who "lost my way this bloody day" when he committed the crime is asking the court to throw out the 2004 guilty plea that sent him to prison for 50 years.
Ronald Pituch, 33, was in Superior Court yesterday for a status hearing on an application he filed himself from New Jersey State Prison, where he is serving a term that would keep him behind bars until he is at least 76 years old.
Pituch claims he did not "know the full extent of my guilty plea" due to what he said was excessive medication for a psychiatric disorder. He is a paranoid schizophrenic who, at the time of his killing spree, refused to take his medication, according to family members.
At his January 2005 sentencing, Pituch told the court that he thought the METALLICA song "Ronnie" had been directed at him. The song tells of a boy who "never laughed, never smiled, talked alone for miles and miles and miles."
In the song, nothing happens in a quiet town until Ronnie pulls a gun, and the children "all fall down, down, down."
Family members said Pituch had stopped taking his medication in the days before the killings, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
A day before the killings, Pituch called Nikki Roberts, an Evesham resident who years earlier was a classmate of his at Shawnee High School in Medford.
He became angry and asked whether she was a METALLICA fan.
"I don't know what all this [expletive] means," he told her. "I must be the son of Satan or something."
