Man Handed Life Terms in Death of Girl, Knife Attacks : Crime: Sentences to run consecutively for murder of child and stabbing of his mother.

SANTA ANA —  A judge on Friday sentenced 21-year-old Michael Robert Pacewitz to 26 years to life in prison plus a separate life term for a night of violence that resulted in the stabbing death of a 3-year-old Fullerton girl, the attempted murder of his own mother and a knife assault on her boyfriend.

Superior Court Judge Richard L. Weatherspoon also included a recommendation that Pacewitz serve his sentence at the Vacaville prison mental facility.

“I strongly recommend that he be sent to Vacaville at the earliest possible moment,” Weatherspoon said in his sentencing report.

Both the victim’s mother and father urged the court to give Pacewitz the maximum possible sentence. Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown then leaned over the rail and asked Pacewitz’s mother, Elena Fontaine, if she wanted to say anything. She started to speak, but fighting tears, remained silent and bowed her head.

Prosecutors contend that Pacewitz killed the little girl to get back at his mother. Fontaine used to baby-sit her and treated her like a granddaughter.

Pacewitz had called the police last March 3 after fatally stabbing 3-year-old Marcelline Onick 44 times while she slept next to her baby brother, who was unharmed, in the Fullerton apartment where he was baby-sitting. Police said the stabbings were so vicious that the little girl’s head was nearly severed.

Just hours earlier, Pacewitz had stabbed his own mother repeatedly at her Anaheim home, nearly killing her, and assaulted her boyfriend who had come to her aid, prosecutors said.

Pacewitz first told reporters in jailhouse interviews that Satan told him to kill the girl. But later, he changed that to say that he thought the little girl and his mother were themselves Satan.

The jurors who convicted him in just one day then deliberated another eight days before deciding that Pacewitz was sane. Most of them said later that they didn’t believe the Satan story.

At Friday’s sentencing hearing, the little girl’s mother, Joann Boydston, told the court that the crime had not only cost her daughter’s life but resulted in the loss of her job, her apartment and a six-month separation from her son, who had been sent to the Orangewood Children’s Home after the incident.

“This crime was senseless and morbid. Michael Pacewitz is a menace to society and will be a danger to the public if ever turned loose,” she declared.

Her statement was in sharp contrast to Boydston’s earlier view of Pacewitz at his preliminary hearing six months ago, when she smiled at him from the front row of the courtroom and told him that she forgave him for what he had done. At that time, she had urged that the most important thing was for Pacewitz to get the mental help he needed.

But on Friday, Boydston called Pacewitz “a jerk.”

“I do forgive him, but he still robbed me of my daughter,” she said. “My son and I were ripped off. He should pay for that.”

The victim’s father, Christopher Onick, told the court that the “unpunished crime” was the emotional impact on Boydston’s son, Vasshawn, now a year and a half, who was in the bedroom with Marcelline, his half-sister.

Later Boydston, who now lives in Riverside County, said she thought it was unfair that her son had been taken from her by the authorities, when her only crime as a mother was “a poor choice of baby-sitters.”

Boydston had left the children with Vasshawn’s natural father the night of the killing. But he went downstairs in the four-plex and asked a neighbor to take over for him. Pacewitz, who was hiding from the Anaheim police at the neighbor’s because of the earlier stabbings at his mother’s home, later offered to take over the baby-sitting chores.

Boydston was a friend of Pacewitz, having met him at Jacob’s Well Christian Centre in Fullerton, and was once a neighbor of Fontaine.

“Vasshawn would wake up screaming with nightmares,” Boydston said. “He’s getting better, but the psychiatrists told us that he knew that something very, very bad was happening to his sister.”

Deputy Public Defender A. Michael Goss Jr. asked the judge to grant Pacewitz a new trial because the jury’s verdict that he was sane was refuted by defense psychiatrists. But the judge refused.

Weatherspoon noted that while the jury convicted Pacewitz of murder of the girl and attempted murder of Fontaine, it found him guilty of only assault--not attempted murder--on his mother’s boyfriend, Juan Marin.

“That tells me that this was a very discriminatory jury,” the judge said.

The judge made the life term for the Fontaine stabbing a consecutive--instead of concurrent--sentence on the recommendation of prosecutor Brown, who said society should be protected from Pacewitz as long as possible.

“There’s no question Mr. Pacewitz does have a mental problem,” Brown said. “But even some of these defense psychiatrists tell us he’s never going to get any better.”

Pacewitz had told his mother shortly before the stabbings that he needed mental help. About 8 p.m. that day, he entered her home, where he had lived off and on, and began flailing at her and her boyfriend with a knife he took from the kitchen, police said.

Before the police arrived, Pacewitz had left and began hitchhiking near Disneyland. Ironically, Boydston was in the car with a girlfriend who picked him up and took him to the neighbor’s apartment in Fullerton.

Pacewitz still had a butcher knife from Boydston’s kitchen in his pocket when police arrested him. He led them back to the apartment where they found the girl’s body.