It's November 15, 2003: the day before the grand opening of the new home of the Church of Scientology of Buffalo. David Miscavige is flying in from his armed California compound for the occasion. Jenna Elfman is coming as well.

And on this day, the Jeremy Perkins case is back in court again. Accused of the murder of his mother, senior Buffalo Scientology auditor Elli Perkins, Judge Shirley Troutman had already found him "not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect." He had been held in a state mental hospital for months. The question now was whether Jeremy, a paranoid schizophrenic, was still too ill to leave the Rochester Forensic Mental Unit.

Judge Troutman rejected the testimony of two staff members of the unit, finding that they were not sufficiently experienced in making the kind of evaluations the court was requesting. So Troutman asked the state to appoint two forensic psychiatrists to examine Jeremy.

All of this was reported in the Buffalo News in an article by Matt Gryta:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/JeremyPerkins/Articles/buffalo-news-2003-11-15.html

Gryta's article ran on November 15. While the Buffalo Scientology org staff may not read the paper, surely all the "publics" (parishioners) saw it. And many of them knew Elli.

What they also knew, but was missing from Gryta's article, was the reason Jeremy went untreated. Scientology was directly responsible for that. Gryta closed his article with the observation that Jeremy Perkins "has a history of schizophrenic problems", and that "Family members had been treating him with vitamins in recent years."

No mention of Scientology at all in that article. The local Org had gotten lucky: no embarassment for Miscavige and Elfman when they arrived for the next day's ceremonies. But this luck would not hold. Stay tuned...

-- Dave Touretzky http://PerkinsTragedy.org http://BuffaloScientologyInfo.com

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