Teen not guilty of murder by reason of mental disease

A high school student from California accused of murdering a man in Grafton has been found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.

Nineteen-year-old Crystal Gutierrez, who was 18 when police found her covered in blood and screaming for help on Grafton’s Spring Street last year, pleaded no contest to second-degree intentional homicide during a June 17 hearing. But based on the finding of two psychologists who examined Gutierrez, Ozaukee County Circuit Judge Paul Malloy ruled that she is not criminally responsible for the death of 34-year-old Brent Fitch.

Ozaukee County District Adam Gerol, who amended a charge of first-degree intentional homicide to second-degree homicide, did not contest the findings of the psychologists.

Malloy ordered Gutierrez committed to the custody of the Wisconsin Department of Health Service. She had been in the county jail in lieu of $100,000 bail since her arrest in May 2019.

While Gutierrez cannot be sentenced to prison, Malloy will decide whether she initially will be confined in an institution or supervised while living in the community. She faces a maximum 40 years of supervision and is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 31.

 The case against Gutierrez began unfolding at 2:20 a.m. May 3, 2019, when her mother called authorities in Ozaukee County from California to report that her daughter sent her a text message pleading for help and included an address on Spring Street in Grafton, according to the criminal complaint.

Officers began searching the area and found Gutierrez, who was bloody and naked from the waist down, running and screaming for help.

Gutierrez told officers that she had woken up and “the family was standing around her,” and she then began stabbing Fitch with a scissors and knife, the complaint states.

Authorities said at the time they did not know what Gutierrez’s comment meant.

Officers knew where Fitch lived, and at his home they found the front door open and a blood trail. His body was found face down on the floor of a bedroom.

Grafton authorities later learned that Fitch had met Gutierrez online and drove to California to pick her up and bring her to his home in Grafton.

A motion filed by Gutierrez’s defense team of public defenders in March shed light on the bizarre case. In their “other acts” motion, which sought to introduce evidence about Fitch not directly related to the case, defense attorneys wrote that Fitch “repeatedly acted to control the defendant and other women with whom he was in a sexual relationship by subjecting them to various degrading and manipulative rules....”

As evidence of this, the motion cited police interviews with several women, one of whom lived at Fitch’s house for nearly two years but was not in a relationship with him.

She said Fitch was “very controlling and narcissistic, and would treat women like objects,” adding that he  had “weird sexual  fetishes,” according to the motion.

Another woman interviewed by police said she met Fitch online and, after he brought her from Kentucky to his home in Grafton, they dated for more than two years.

She described Fitch as physically and mentally controlling to the extent that she had to ask his permission before she could eat, and said he became very angry at times and that one of their arguments became physical.

She also told authorities that in 2017 Fitch met a 19-year-old woman from Waco, Texas, online and brought her to his house. The 19-year-old and Fitch fought constantly and the teenager moved out after about a month, she said.

Another woman who also met Fitch online said he told her that he had a girlfriend from California named Crystal and that in late April 2019 he drove there to pick her up, according to the motion.

The defense motion sought to prove Gutierrez was provoked and therefore should face a second-degree, rather than a first-degree, homicide charge, but a hearing on the motion was never held because Gerol agreed to amend the charge and the case was resolved.