Is man fit for trial in grisly slaying?
ST. PETERSBURG – The murder shocked and revolted the community. Police said Dennis Roache, a man with a history of mental health problems, broke into his ex-girlfriend’s Childs Park home in February 2002 and attacked her boyfriend with a machete. Roache cut off the man’s head, then carried it outside and placed it on the windshield of an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. He placed a mirror in front of the head “so that if the head were still alive, it could see itself,” police said. More than four years later, judges twice have declared Roache incompetent to stand trial and have shipped him to a state mental hospital. Both times, the facility has sent Roache back to the Pinellas County Jail after hospital officials determined he was competent. Roache, 38, was returned again in April and is scheduled for trial Oct. 3. But Roache’s attorneys will try to persuade a judge once again to declare him incompetent, which would result in a third trip to a mental hospital. “I think the facts and circum
ST. PETERSBURG – The murder shocked and revolted the community. Police said Dennis Roache, a man with a history of mental health problems, broke into his ex-girlfriend’s Childs Park home in February 2002 and attacked her boyfriend with a machete. Roache cut off the man’s head, then carried it outside and placed it on the windshield of an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. He placed a mirror in front of the head “so that if the head were still alive, it could see itself,” police said. More than four years later, judges twice have declared Roache incompetent to stand trial and have shipped him to a state mental hospital. Both times, the facility has sent Roache back to the Pinellas County Jail after hospital officials determined he was competent. Roache, 38, was returned again in April and is scheduled for trial Oct. 3. But Roache’s attorneys will try to persuade a judge once again to declare him incompetent, which would result in a third trip to a mental hospital. “I think the facts and circum
