Disregarded by The Law: Andre Thomas

I first heard about this case from my favorite true-crime podcast True Crime All The Time on Spotify. Shout out to the hosts Mike Ferguson and Mike Gibson. This case fascinated me when I first heard about it and I thought it would be a great first case for my new segment “Disregarded by the Law”. In this segment, I want to focus on people that may not have been victims in their cases but were wronged by the law after their arrest and just seemed to be brushed off by the law. I want to start this post by saying the subject of this post is in no way the victim of his case. I also want to say that the details of this case are not for the faint of heart. Now, of course, most true crime stories are gruesome but I’m warning you. This one is indescribably horrific.

Andre Thomas lived in Grayson County Texas with his mother and five brothers. The Thomas family was not well off as Andre was growing up. They spent a lot of their time in church. Both of Andre’s parents dealt with their own issues. His mother raised him and his siblings, she also suffered from mental illness and thought she received messages from God. There were also reports that Andre’s father suffered from alcoholism. Despite all of the challenges Andre was facing at home, his classmates said that he was eager to share bible stories, respectful, didn’t complain and just seemed to be an all-around decent kid. He also had a love of cars and was known to be a tinkerer. He said that he wanted to design cars when he grew up.

Andre started hearing voices in his head around age nine, he would hear things like angels and demons arguing. In an attempt to drown out the voices, Andre began drinking at a young age. Andre’s first suicide attempt came when he was still in elementary school when he slit his wrists open. He began smoking marijuana when he was thirteen. Thirteen was also the age that Andre’s next suicide attempt came when he cut his wrists with a butcher knife. Around age fifteen Andre started to have some run-ins with the law. This was also around the time when he fell in love with a beautiful blonde-haired girl named Laura Boren. Laura soon became pregnant and gave birth to their son Andre Jr. In 2000. When Andre was eighteen and Laura was seventeen, the couple married. But only a few months after they got married the couple separated. Laura eventually moved on and had a child named Lehya with another man.

From about 2000 until about 2002 Andre accrued over 20 minor charges ranging from driving without a license to minor in possession/consumption of alcohol. In this time it also seemed that Andre’s mental state just continued to get worse and worse. In my research, I found multiple sources that said Andre would duct tape his mouth shut for days at a time. He also added the cold medicine Coricidin to the mix of drugs he was using to try to self medicate. He had a hard time keeping a job to help support his family. In the month or so leading up to the tragic day of March 27th, 2004, Andre went to a mental health clinic and a hospital after two suicide attempts. Unfortunately, Andre left both of these places without getting any kind of treatment.

Before I get into what happened on March 27, 2004, let me say one last time that these details are very gruesome. Early in the morning around 7 am Andre kicked in the door to the home of his estranged wife Laura and her boyfriend. Andre then stabbed Laura, his son Andre Jr. and Laura’s daughter Leyha to death. Andre also carved the children’s hearts out as well as part of Laura’s lung which he thought was her heart. Andre did all of this with separate knives for each victim. Either while Andre was still at the crime scene he created or after walking to his father’s house after the murders, he stabbed himself three times in the chest. Hours after these terrible murders Andre turns himself in to the police. He walks in the Sherman County Police Department, bleeding from his stab wounds and was arrested by a detective. Andre was then taken to a local hospital where his injuries were treated. He was released on March 29th and was transported to Grayson County Jail. About 6 days after his arrest Andre removed his right eye. Before Andre’s trial, two court-ordered psychologists determined he was not competent to stand trial. But, after Andre was sent away to get treatment for about six weeks at Texas Department of Mental Health and Retardation at the Vernon Campus, the chief psychologist concluded that he thought Andre was “exaggerating” his symptoms and said that he was in a state of “drug-induced psychosis” at the time of the murders. Thus, claiming Andre was competent to stand trial. Andre was then sent back to Grayson County Jail. I think it’s important to note that Andre’s lawyer had an opportunity to request a competency hearing before Andre’s trial but for whatever reason he did not. It’s also important to note that multiple jurors were not contested by Andre’s defense team that were openly against interracial marriages like the one Andre and Laura were in. Also, every single person on the jury was white.

The trial began in February of 2005. Many sources said throughout the entire trial Andre just sat there with an eye patch on his eye eating skittles as all of the evidence was being presented. The jury recommended that he be sentenced to death and the judge upheld their recommendation and Andre was sentenced to death. He was then sent to the Polunsky Unit Livingston. While on death row, Andre took out his remaining eye and ate it. He also has made more suicide attempts, one that resulted in him getting eight sutures to close the wound he cut in his throat. He also attacked a fellow inmate and had to be sprayed with a chemical spray to be subdued.

Like I said at the start of this post, Andre is in no way the victim of his case and I think that what he did is extremely heartbreaking and horrifying. With that being said, although Andre did what he did I just don’t think he is some cold-blooded killer that didn’t care about the people he ended up killing. I think Andre is severely mentally ill and never really received the proper help that he needed. Given that Andre’s family sometimes couldn’t afford electricity when he was growing up it’s pretty obvious that they were not well off enough to find the kind of help that Andre needed. In my research, I found some sources that said before Andre committed the murders the voices in his head told him that his son Andre Jr. was the antichrist and that Laura was a jezebel. The voices also told him that the only way to free their souls was to kill them without cross-contaminating their blood. After the murders, Andre called Laura’s parents after he had just tried to call Laura. The woman he had just murdered. Laura’s parents didn’t answer the phone so Andre left them a voicemail that went something like this:

“Sherry this is Andre. I need yall’s help. Something bad is happening to me and it keeps happening. And I don’t know what’s going on. I need help. I think I’m in hell. I need help. Someone needs to come and help me. I need help bad. I’m desperate. I’m afraid to go to sleep. So when you get this message come by the house, please. Hello?”

Now if you can’t gather that this person struggles with mental health issues from the transcript of that phone call then I’m not sure what else anyone could show you to persuade you. Not to mention that by the time he went to trial he had already plucked out one of his eyes and after being sentenced he decided to remove the other one, too. I also think that the fact that Andre reportedly had mental health issues from a young age and a family history of mental illness makes the opinion of the chief psychologist at The Texas Department of Mental Health and Retardation at the Vernon Campus that ultimately caused Andre to be deemed competent to stand trial is unfair. Now obviously, I don’t think the alcohol, marijuana and Coricidin Andre was using to try to self medicate necessarily helped the situation at hand. But I do think that his mental health was its own separate issue from the drug use and I think he was just trying to help quiet the voices whether it actually helped or not. And I think it is reasonable to think almost anyone else in a mental state such as Andre’s may consider doing the same thing. I also think it is plausible to infer that if Andre had gotten the right kind of help for his mental health at an earlier age then maybe he wouldn’t have done something like this. And I also think that Andre’s lawyer not trying to get him a competency hearing before his trial possibly took away an opportunity for his mental state to be discussed the way that it really should have. From what I could find in my research, every other mental health professional that examined other than the chief psychologist at Texas Department of Mental Health and Retardation at the Vernon campus Andre reported that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, had poor decision-making skills and was considerably impaired. One of my sources, John T Floyd Law Firm Blog, provided quotes from some of the other doctors that examined Andre. This first quote comes from Dr. Edward Gripon who was appointed by the judge of Andre’s case to assist the defense in preparing their insanity defense. He comments on his opinion of Andre’s mental state on March 27, 2004, by saying:

”I believe that he was operating under the effect of a psychotic illness at that time, specifically schizophrenia, in which he believed that he was doing what was directed by or that he was at least operating under the direction of God in fighting these demons, saving the world; that that was all based upon a psychosis, and that based upon that psychosis, he did not know that that conduct at that time was wrong.” Id., at LEXIS 54-55.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Gripon was not called to testify at trial.

Andre’s lawyer did call Dr. Kate Allen to the stand to comment on Andre’s future dangerousness. “Dr. Allen testified that she interviewed Thomas and reviewed “documents that were relevant to looking at his childhood, his development, and his functioning.” She concluded the convicted killer suffered from “schizophrenia” and that this mental illness was the “driving force” which made him commit the crimes for which he was being tried. The doctor finally concluded that with proper treatment and medication his future dangerousness would be diminished. Id., at LEXIS 55-56.” Although Andre’s lawyer did call Dr. Allen, he didn’t call her until the penalty phase of the trial, after Andre had already been found guilty.

I found in my research said what most of the jurors really wanted to hear from Andre was true remorse for the murders. And to be honest I think that is just an absolutely unfair thing to ask of someone as mentally ill as Andre. In his mind, he was saving his family and freeing their souls by doing what he thought God wanted him to do. I think what the jury should have been really looking for and questioning is that if Andre knew what he was doing was wrong at the time he did it. And if it were up to me I would say that the answer to that question is no. Also, the fact that the jury that served in Andre’s case was completely white and that some members of the jury were against interracial marriages like Laura and Andre’s that were never contested by Andre’s lawyer, was just like shooting Andre’s case in the leg before the trial ever even started. Now I’m not saying that Andre’s mental state or the way his case was handled frees him from guilt or makes what he did to Laura, Andre Jr., and Leyha okay. None of them deserved to lose their lives that day and I understand that if it weren’t for Andre that they would probably still be alive today and that is tragic. All I’m saying is that I think this case is tragic from more than one angle. Andre now lives in the Beauford H. Jester IV Unit in Richmond, Texas. Andre’s case is now going through the appeal process partly because his original lawyers didn’t do their jobs properly. Brandi Grissom wrote an article for the Texas Tribune where they reported that when Maurie Levin, a co-director of the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law asked Andre “if he knows why the state wants to execute him.” He said,

“They don’t want me to fulfill my purpose. That would make me superior. They don’t want me to be superior. Because I’m black, but that’s not all of it,” she said he told her. “I know I was convicted. I don’t understand why I was convicted.”

At the end of the day, what Andre did was horrible but I just don’t believe he should be put to death by the state of Texas for what he did on March 27, 2004. It is pretty clear to me that he was and still is very mentally ill. And I just don’t think being sick is a reason to be put to death. That’s it for this post everyone thank you for sticking through this long and gruesome post with me. Also, I hope you like the idea of this new segment feel free to leave me some feedback and please come back and visit soon to read about the next Black Sheep Tribune case.

Victims

Laura Christine Boren Thomas

Andre Lee Boren

Lehya Marie Hughes

Sources