FAYETTE – The 14-year-old Fayette boy accused of murdering a teenage neighbor is scheduled to make his second appearance in juvenile court today in Augusta.
If Patrick Armstrong’s attorney, Walter McKee, goes forward with asking the court to release Armstrong to his parents’ custody today as he previously stated, Assistant Attorney General Andrew Benson said Wednesday he would argue that Armstrong should remain in state custody.
“Our position is he should be detained until the case is resolved and, with any luck, beyond that,” Benson said.
The state has filed a motion asking the court to order a diagnostic evaluation, a psychological-type evaluation, on Armstrong, Benson said, to determine whether the state would seek a bind-over to have Armstrong tried as an adult.
On Wednesday, McKee said he had several things going on the case and hadn’t decided what he’d ask the court to do during the probable-cause detention hearing at 8:30 a.m. today in 7th District Court in Augusta.
State Police arrested Armstrong on Nov. 29 and charged him with the Nov. 26 murder of Marlee Johnston, 14, of Fayette. The two teens lived about one-third mile from each other on roads around Lovejoy Pond.
Johnston’s 17-year-old brother found her body in the water of a cove off Loon Watch Lane, about a half-mile from her home, after Marlee failed to return home from walking the family’s dogs.
Armstrong has been held at a juvenile detention center in Charleston where he has been visited by his parents, McKee said.
The attorney said his client is a normal 14-year-old boy, who was home-schooled for most of his life starting at a very young age, with the exception of one week when he tried public school and it didn’t work out.
He also said Armstrong’s parents, Kenneth Armstrong, a respiratory therapist by training who is physically disabled, and Betty Jean Armstrong, a charge nurse at an Augusta nursing home, adapted their schedules so that they could share in his and his older sister’s home-schooling.
McKee painted a different picture than the words that Patrick had posted online on several Web sites used by teenagers; some of those posting portray him as a troubled and angry young man.
“He strikes me as an intelligent, thoughtful kid,” McKee said. Patrick loved to horseback ride, and he loved animals and pets, and enjoyed skateboarding and snowboarding, McKee said.
For teens, earlier banter on the phone and other verbal communication have been replaced by Web site correspondence, McKee said.
“We see some of those things and they look shocking,” he said. But if people remember what they did and said as 14-year-olds, many of those things were just as shocking.
It doesn’t suggest an underlying psychosis, he said.
It’s a psychosis of a 14-year-old, he said.
Armstrong doesn’t have a criminal record, McKee said.
The boy’s family has lived in the same house in Fayette for nearly 20 years, he said.
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