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JANUARY 18, 2010 – JULY 29, 2011 · THE STANDOFF AND THE GUILTY-BUT-MENTALLY-ILL VERDICT
The town's third appellate case is a siege that ended without a death, and its record is the fullest picture the public record gives of Walkerton's department at work alongside the county's. Matthew D. Rozinski and his wife Renissa had been married nine years and lived in Walkerton with two young children when, on the night of January 18, 2010, an argument over her day's whereabouts became a beating: the Court of Appeals recites that he struck her repeatedly, lifted her by the neck, straddled her and squeezed her throat until she could not breathe, then took a nine-millimeter pistol from the nightstand, told her the only way she would leave the home was in a body bag, and fired a shot into the floor three inches from her foot. Her sister, drawn by desperate calls from a broken phone, was ordered out at gunpoint and called the police. Rozinski released the children to the street but held his wife; he fired once toward her father and once toward a police officer as both men took cover behind a parked van, wounding neither; Renissa escaped through a side door to an officer positioned in the backyard — Walkerton Police Officer Brett Verkler, who had covered the backyard and helped her to safety. The St. Joseph County SWAT team took up position; over hours of negotiation Rozinski claimed other personalities — a "guardian," a "bad guy" — would not let him come out. Fifteen minutes after the negotiators threatened gas, he surrendered. Verkler drove him to the Walkerton police station and on to the St. Joseph County Jail, and the opinion preserves the defendant's own words to him on the way — "I knew exactly where you were at" — offered in evidence of a mind that had tracked the night clearly.
The State charged ten counts on January 21, 2010: attempted murder as a Class A felony; three counts of criminal confinement; domestic battery; strangulation; criminal recklessness; and three counts of pointing a handgun. Rozinski pleaded insanity. Two court-appointed experts concluded he had not been sane; the bench trial nonetheless found, on the lay testimony of the night's witnesses and the defendant's own inconsistent accounts — he had never mentioned voices in nine years of marriage, and his claimed amnesias shifted between tellings — that he had not carried his burden of proving he could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct. He was found guilty but mentally ill on all ten counts and sentenced to an aggregate of twenty years in the Department of Correction. On July 29, 2011, the Court of Appeals affirmed, holding on Barany v. State that unanimous expert testimony does not bind the trier of fact against probative lay evidence of sanity: Rozinski v. State, No. 71A05-1010-CR-640 (Ind. Ct. App. 2011), a memorandum decision, cited here as the case's own record and for no precedential weight it does not claim. No one died in Walkerton that night; the case stands in this section because it is the town's modern grave case entire — attempted murder, tried and appealed — and because its record shows the layered response this county now fields: town officers first, the county SWAT team around them, one prosecutor over all of it.
Sources: Rozinski v. State, No. 71A05-1010-CR-640 (Ind. Ct. App. July 29, 2011) (facts of January 18, 2010; charges of January 21, 2010; the guilty-but-mentally-ill findings; the aggregate twenty-year sentence; affirmance), read first-hand for this build; the children identified in the opinion by initials only and so carried here.