The Joseph Palczynski Story

Her son was facing serious time in jail, and this time Pat Long didn't know how to help.

Of all the women in Joe Palczynski's life, none had struggled harder to give him a future. Over the years, the 56-year-old woman wrote judges begging for leniency. She pleaded with prison wardens. She asked the girls Joe abused - and their parents - not to file charges, not to set his life back one more time.

Long knew what it was to come from behind. After becoming pregnant in high school, she dropped out to marry Joseph Palczynski Sr., a construction worker. They had two daughters and two sons. When Joseph, their third child, was 5, Long left her husband. She eventually married again: John Long was a budget analyst with Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.

One of the marriage's first challenges was finding the right school for Joseph. He failed early grades at several schools before the Longs found a special education program that would work for a child later diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But his behavior continued to get him into trouble.

When he was 15, Joseph was charged with stealing a friend's gun. Then, in 1985, after his older sister Karen died in a car accident, the 16-year-old fell into a depression and spent most of the summer being treated in the Walter P. Carter Center psychiatric hospital. He had threatened to kill both his stepfather and his biological father, according to mental health reports.

By then, he had also acquired the habit of telling people he was "going to die by the bullet."

His grieving mother knew she had her hands full with Joseph - she never used his nickname "Joby" - and would do anything not to lose another child. Determined to show her son there were plenty of reasons to live, she helped him buy cars, motorcycles and Jet Skis, made sure he had cash. She drove girls from the neighborhood to visit him when he was in jail, brought him a book on electronics so he could learn a skill. She even set aside money to help him when he was released.

But she also criticized the way he treated women.

Pat Long says she grew up in a home where her father beat her mother. She says she was the victim of abuse herself. That kind of damage you can't repair, she told her son.

If you touch her, you might as well leave her, she remembers saying.

But she spit at me, Mom!

So? You're a man. Walk away.

So why don't they walk away?

She knew her son's violent outbursts firsthand. Once, when she washed his jeans and forgot to remove a special black address book from the pocket, he threw a heavy statue of a seahorse past her and hit the living room wall.

"He said, 'I ought to set the house on fire while I'm at it.' I didn't know what to do. He said 'Don't you call anybody, don't you dare.' ... After it was all over, he goes, 'I would never hurt you, don't you know that?'$"

Long says her son was a fun-loving guy. "But at times he got angry. You know why? I carried him angry," she says, referring to her pregnancy during her troubled marriage. "I knew that went into Joseph. It was hate. Hate. I had hate inside me."

Long considered her son's anger uncontrollable, a result of mental illness or perhaps the head injury he received in a minor school bus accident at age 14. Although never condoning his behavior, she believed the girls he dated, girls who said they loved him, should have known better than to provoke his rage.

Joseph treated his girlfriends well, was kind and generous to their children, helped them overcome their problems, she says. But he also chose to date girls who were young - girls who were compassionate enough, or naive enough, or down and out enough not to judge him by his past. The more they blossomed, the more jealous and possessive he became.

"Joseph always thought he could help the poor [ones]," Long says. "He had to relate to that poor stuff, those nothing girls, because he wanted to feel special. ... Tracy had nothing until she met Joseph. He made her into someone new, into a nice young lady. He didn't want someone else to have Tracy."

Long once saw him hit the young woman, but she felt there was little she could do except urge her son to get medication and keep her own lines of communication open.

When Joseph punched a hole in her living room wall last year, Long blamed herself. She apologized for making him snap at a time when he was grieving the death of his stepfather, John Long. In 1997, after surviving surgery and treatment for melanoma, Pat Long had decided to leave her husband. She filed for divorce. Last December, he killed himself.

Now, less than three months later, her son was facing new charges. Long dreaded the likelihood that he would return to jail, a place where he said he had been sexually assaulted. She was certain he would do almost anything not to go back. It was impossible not to feel despair.

On March 6, when Joseph dropped by, Pat told him how she felt.

She said she felt like dying.

He asked if she wanted to buy a gun. Together, he said, they could "join John and Karen." Long refused to kill herself. But her son felt otherwise.

I'm going to die, he told her. I can't live no more. I'm going to have to die.

Later that day, Joby persuaded one of his mother's neighbors to buy him a 12-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle. He needed them, he told her, for target practice.