Steven Hayes
“I just started to lose it.”
“I just snapped.”
“I wasn’t thinking right; I don’t know what I was thinking. It was so unlike me. I’d never done anything like that.”
Are these the words of someone who threw a sucker punch in a bar . . . cut off another driver in high-speed traffic . . . a man horrified that he slapped his wife in the heat of a domestic argument . . . or maybe an honor student who inexplicably froze when he opened the first page of his SAT booklet?
No, these are the words of 50-year-old Steven Hayes who, along with his partner in crime Joshua Komisarjevsky, 33, in 2007 broke into the Cheshire, Connecticut home of Dr. William Petit, his wife Jennifer Hawke-Petit and their daughters Hayley and Michaela. William, the only survivor, was beaten nearly to death with a baseball bat. Jennifer and Michaela were raped, Jennifer was strangled to death and the two girls were tied to their beds just before the house was set on fire.
Really, though, it was all some big misunderstanding. “To this day I don’t know why it happened. I just wanted money. That’s all I was looking for.”
Maybe we can shed some light on that for you, Mr. Hayes.
