Former Lacrosse Player on trial for killing

After his arrest,
Chad Gurney calmly confessed to police how he had cut off her
head and set her body on fire, a prosecutor said Monday. Gurney,
29, is using an insanity defense in the May 25, 2009,
ritualistic-style killing of 18-year-old Zoe Sarnacki in his
Portland apartment. But Assistant District Attorney Don Macomber
said in his opening statement that Gurney wasn’t delusional or
suffering hallucinations in the time leading up to or after the
slaying, and that the evidence will prove he wasn’t insane. Gurney
was raised in central Maine and attended Liberty University in
Virginia after high school. While at Liberty, he was severely
injured in March 2005 when a school passenger van carrying the
lacrosse team was rear-ended by another school van in Alabama and
pushed into the path of a tractor-trailer. After the accident,
Gurney suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression,
defense attorney Sarah Churchill said. It was a “perfect storm” of
conditions — his injuries, chronic pain, withdrawing from his
medication and new ideas from friends — that prevented him from
appreciating the wrongfulness of killing Sar-nacki, she said.
Gurney and Sarnacki met earlier in the year and had been dating for
a short time, although not exclusively. Macomber suggested that
Gurney was angered by Sarnacki’s admission that she had slept with
someone else while he was visiting a friend in British Columbia.
She later refused his request to quit her job at a bagel shop and
join him on a trip to Thailand, where he hoped to further his
interest in Eastern religion. Gurney suggested his anger had gotten
the best of him when he called friends before his arrest and
admitted what he had done, Macomber said. “He told them she had
done something that had hurt him and he was tired of being hurt,
and he lost it,” Macomber said. via Bangor Daily News

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