5-7-2014 Michigan:LANSING — Greg Basolo said he shot and killed his father last year because he was “enraged” about other family members sexual abusing him as a child.
At a hearing Wednesday in Ingham County Circuit Court, Basolo pleaded guilty but mentally ill to second-degree murder in the shooting death of his 79-year-old father, Peter. The incident happened Oct. 25, 2013 at the Okemos condominium they shared.
Prosecutors said Basolo’s claims are baseless, and no one has ever been charged with sexually abusing him. Basolo, a former member of the Meridian Township’s assessing board of review, is 50. The alleged abuse would have happened more than 40 years ago.
“We dispute his allegation that he was sexually abused as a child,” Assistant Prosecutor John Dewane said in an interview.
A family spokesman said the family denies Basolo’s claims of sexual abuse.
Basolo told Judge Rosemarie Aquilina he had read a bank statement that day showing his father had “(gone) back to people in the family that...had hurt me.”
Basolo alleges he was sexually abused by his mother and sister when he was a young child. He said he and his father disagreed about how to handle it.
“For some reason, I just became enraged, and I could feel everything inside of me just going off, and I told myself, ‘I’m going to kill him,’” Basolo said. “I hadn’t even been thinking about that 15 minutes prior.”
As part of an agreement with prosecutors, Basolo will serve at least 25 years in prison. Aquilina will sentence him on June 25. A guilty but mentally ill conviction means he can receive mental health treatment while in prison.
There is no dispute that Basolo is mentally ill. He was receiving mental health treatment before the incident. In the days afterward, he was taken from the Ingham County Jail to a psychiatric hospital in Detroit, where he was diagnosed with personality disorder as well as major depressive disorder with psychosis. A state psychologist last month, however, found Basolo was not legally insane when he killed his father.
Family members previously told the State Journal that Basolo’s father took Basolo in when he was in his 20s. At the time, Basolo was extremely socially awkward, they said. His stepmother, Carol Basolo, a longtime Lansing schoolteacher who died in 2007, worked extensively with him, they said.
Basolo told Aquilina that his biological mother is still alive. He said he hasn’t talked to her, but she has written to him in jail.
Basolo’s attorney, Patrick Crowley, emphasized the plea was Basolo’s choice. Crowley said he disagreed with that choice, but he was following his client’s wishes.
“I don’t believe this is the resolution that should have come out in this case,” he said.
Under questioning from Dewane, Basolo said that on the day of the killing he drove around “in the country” for more than four hours, thinking of different ways he could kill his father. He considered using a baseball bat.
He returned to the Fox Hollow Drive condominium at about 7:30 p.m.
“I shot him in the back of the head while he was sleeping in his favorite chair in the living room,” Basolo said. “He didn’t know it was coming, and he didn’t even know that I was angry with him.”
Basolo shot his father, a former Michigan State Police captain, with the loaded .357-caliber revolver his father kept near his bed. Shortly after, Basolo turned himself into police.
Basolo said he intended to kill himself, but couldn’t go through with it. He said going to prison for what he expects to be the rest of his life is “my way of killing myself.”
“I do want to say I’m sorry,” he added. “I want justice for my father. In many ways, he was a good father.” ..Source.. by Kevin Grasha
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