A teenager who raped and killed his maths teacher while at school faces life in prison after
being convicted.
A Massachusetts jury on
Tuesday found him guilty of raping and murdering
his 24 year old teacher, Colleen Ritzer, at his suburban high school in 2013, after about nine
hours of deliberations.
The teenager’s defence lawyers claimed he was in the midst of a psychotic episode when he
stabbed her 16 times in the neck in the women's bathroom.
Prosecutors said the schoolboy, who was 14 at the time, used a box cutter to brutally stab the
24-year-old, before using a recycling bin to take
her body into the woods.
In finding 16-year-old Philip Chism guilty, the jury rejected the defense's argument that he was suffering from a psychotic episode at the time of the 2013 attack and therefore not criminally responsible for his actions.
Chism was 14 when he committed the killing at
his high school in Danvers, Massachusetts, but he
was tried as an adult and could be sentenced to life in prison.
Prosecutors presented voluminous evidence
during the month-long trial, including school surveillance videos, to support allegations that Chism followed his teacher, Colleen Ritzer, into a bathroom after school, strangled and raped her, and carted her body in a recycling bin to a
wooded area off campus.
The trial at Essex County Superior Court in Salem,
Massachusetts, was occasionally delayed by
Chism, who at one point refused to return to the courtroom after a break telling his attorney that
he was "about to explode."
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