The Houston Chronicle

October 17, 1997, Friday 3 STAR EDITION

Lawsuit against psychiatrist who treated killer reinstated by court

SOURCE: Staff

BYLINE: GEORGE FLYNN

SECTION: A; Pg. 37

LENGTH: 472 words

The widow of a man killed by his deranged stepson had her lawsuit reinstated Thursday against a psychiatrist accused of failing to warn the family about the stepson’s threats prior to the 1988 killing.
The First Court of Appeals ruled Thursday in a wrongful death negligence suit by Lyndall Zezulka against Dr. Renu Thapar, the psychiatrist who treated her son, Vietnam veteran Freddy Ray Lilly.
Lilly, 51, was living in a trailer house behind the Zezulka home in northeast Harris County, when he went inside his mother’s bedroom and took out a shotgun from under the bed.
He waited until his stepfather, Henry R. Zezulka, 48, arrived home from work and shot him in the face on Sept. 28, 1988. Lilly, under treatment for being delusional and paranoid, said he shot because believed his victim was going to burn his trailer.
Thapar had been Lilly’s psychiatrist since May 1985. The appellate court’s opinion said Lilly had been through numerous treatment centers for post-traumatic stress disorder since his return from Vietnam, where he was an intelligence specialist who did two tours of Army duty during the war there.
Lilly was being treated with anti-depressants and anti-psychotic medication. In 1987, Thapar discharged him from one mental hospital where he had gone after “having flashbacks about his killing and burning bodies in Vietnam, nightmares and strong feelings of paranoia.”
Lilly was hospitalized at other times, the last ending about five weeks before the shooting. The suit accused Thapar of failing in his duty to warn law enforcement agencies or family members, who regularly took clothes to Lilly, about his pending discharge or his alleged threats against his stepfather or Asian-Americans or African-Americans.
The suit said Thapar, after the killing, warned court and jail personnel about the threats. It also accuses Thapar of altering hospital records after the shooting. Lilly was found incompetent to be tried for the killing, attorneys said.
A state district judge granted a summary judgment motion for the defense, finding that the psychiatrist had no duty to the widow because he had no doctor-patient relationship with her.
The opinion noted that past appellate rulings have found that doctors had no special responsibility or duty to the general public.
“We are not asked in this case if a doctor may be responsible to the public at large,” the opinion said. “Because Dr. Thapar allegedly knew of a specific threat to a specific person, she may have had a duty to warn that person, based on facts to be developed at trial.”
Thapar attorney Marion Kruse said the opinion will be reviewed before any decision is made about an appeal of that ruling.
The opinion was authored by Justice Michol O’Connor, with the concurrence of Chief Justice Michael Schneider and Justice Tim Taft.