Connecticut Horror Punctuates a Trend

The pair beat Petit and tied him up in the basement. After 9 a.m., his wife was forced to go to a Bank of America branch, where she withdrew $15,000 while alerting a teller that her family was being held hostage, according to law enforcement officials and documents.

Police, including a SWAT team, were dispatched to the Petit home and apprehended the men after they had set fire to the home and were attempting to escape in the family's SUV. Petit escaped from the house while it burned.

One suspect, the lanky, scruffy Komisarjevsky, lived less than two miles from the Petits -- he is the son of a family with a storied history in Russian opera and theater. Hayes appears to have met Komisarjevsky in a halfway house after they were paroled.

The case also generated a broad outcry because the men were granted early release from prison by a parole board that failed to review transcripts from the men's sentencing hearings, as mandated by a widely ignored Connecticut law. "They are saying they didn't have the funds to make the copies," said state Rep. James A. Amann, speaker of the Connecticut House. "It is the lamest and most inexcusable excuse I've ever heard."

Had board members read the transcripts, they would have discovered that a judge had called Komisarjevsky a calculating, "cold-blooded predator." He used night-vision goggles while burglarizing homes, the transcripts noted.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R) has convened a panel of specialists for a "top to bottom" review of the justice system to see how and why it failed in releasing the two suspects. The legislature is conducting hearings with the goal of enacting harsher laws.

But in Cheshire, the damage is done.

"It's always been a fear of mine that someone would [break] into our house," Kevin Mirando, the Cheshire teenager, said as his mother gave him a concerned look. "I tell myself to be quiet, that it's not going to happen. But I bet that's what the [Petit] girls were saying too."

Travis Fox of washingtonpost.com and staff researcher Madonna A. Lebling contributed to this report.