During testimony, psychologist recounts Amy Hebert’s description of her children’s final moments.
THIBODAUX -- Amy Hebert’s 9-year-old daughter begged for her life before the knife-wielding mother stabbed her to death, a forensic psychologist testified Sunday during the Mathews woman’s capital-murder trial.
” ‘Mommy, I don’t want to die. I love you,’ ”
Camille Hebert told her mother, according to psychologist Glenn Ahava’s testimony about his interviews of Hebert.
” ‘I love you, too, but I can’t let daddy take you,’ ” he said Hebert replied, referring to her ex-husband, Chad Hebert.
She told her 7-year-old son, Braxton, the same thing, Ahava said.
Hebert, a 42-year-old former teacher’s aide at Lockport Lower Elementary, has entered dual pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the children’s deaths Aug. 20, 2007. She faces the possibility of the death sentence if convicted.
Court was also held Saturday, a session during which witnesses testified that Hebert and her ex-husband had sought to save their troubled marriage through counseling.
Ahava, who practices in Lafayette, testified Sunday that Hebert, a devout Evangelical Christian, told him during a series of jailhouse interviews last year that she was following the voice of God when she fatally stabbed her daughter, her mildly autistic son and the family’s dog, Princess.
The testimony came on the trial’s seventh day, in which a near-capacity crowd of family members, friends and spectators watched the proceedings in Judge Jerome Barbera’s courtroom.
“Ms. Hebert was and is a religious woman,” Ahava testified. “She had a delusion that God was speaking to her. She believed that by sacrificing her life, her children’s lives and the dog’s life she was following God’s will.“
The prosecution argues Hebert stabbed her children to death in an act of revenge against her ex-husband, who had announced his plans to marry another woman.
Ahava’s two-hour stay on the witness stand included statements about the content of Hebert’s suicide notes to her ex-husband and his mother.
The defense hired Ahava to judge whether Hebert was fabricating or exaggerating details of a mental disorder to avoid prosecution.
The psychologist testified he believes she was being truthful in her recollections. He determined she was psychotic, and therefore incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, when she killed her children.
Ahava said he came to this determination after interviewing the defendant four times, performing several psychological tests on her, interviewing several people who knew her and reviewing her medical records. Overall, he estimated he spent 70 hours working on the case.
Hebert told him she first stabbed her daughter while the girl slept in the master bedroom and then stabbed her in the bathroom. It was unclear from Ahava’s testimony at what point Camille Hebert looked upon her mother with fear and told her she loved her.
Ahava said Hebert also told him she brought her son into the living room and stabbed him on the couch.
“I believe it was a slow and painful death for the kids,” Ahava said.
As she has done at other points in the case, Hebert cried during Ahava’s testimony, as did her ex-husband.
The stabbings occurred after Hebert woke around 3 a.m. to a voice she believed was God urging her to kill her children and herself in order to preserve their family, she told Ahava. Their interviews occurred at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel, where Hebert was jailed at the time.
Hebert, he said, initially struggled with the voice’s commands. She twice retreated from the master bedroom, where the children slept, after finding herself unable to stab them.
Following the second failed attempt, the voice directed her to practice stabbing her daughter’s bed, Hebert told Ahava. After that, Ahava said, Hebert returned to the bedroom and stabbed the girl.
Earlier in the trial, forensic psychologist David Self of Texas testified that Hebert told him the voice she heard was that of Satan.
During his 67-minute cross-examination, Lafourche Parish District Attorney Cam Morvant II asked Ahava if he was familiar with the biblical story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Ahava acknowledged knowing the story, which ends with God revealing to Abraham a sacrificial ram moments before he would have killed his son.
“Was Abraham psychotic in your opinion?” Morvant asked Ahava.
“No, sir,” the psychologist replied. Morvant also bombarded Ahava with questions about the suicide notes Hebert wrote her ex-husband and his mother, Judy Hebert.
While Hebert told Self the voice dictated the note’s contents to her, she did not say the same thing to Ahava.
She called her ex-husband and his soon-to-be wife, Kimberly, “lying, adulterating whores” for engaging in an affair while Amy and Chad were still married.
She lashed out at Judy Hebert for taking her children around the new woman and noted that was why she no longer allowed them to see Judy.
At the bottom of the note to Judy Hebert, she told her father and two sisters she was sorry.
“Nowhere in the note does she say the voice took over, right?” Morvant asked Ahava. The psychologist agreed.
Prior to Ahava’s testimony, the jury heard a half dozen of Hebert’s friends and coworkers describe her downcast mood and unfaltering love for her children.
Hebert’s close friend Robin Reed spoke of a prayer intervention she and Naomi Lyons held in Hebert’s bedroom in the summer of 2007 after she tearfully told Reed she felt like she had a demon inside her.
Hebert also expressed thoughts of suicide in a separate meeting during the same summer, Reed said.
“Amy was always a good mother,” Anthony Reed said. “I don’t know many mothers I would say were better mothers.”
Staff Writer Raymond Legendre can be reached at 448-7617 or raymond.legendre@houmatoday.com.
