Mother Held in Girls' Deaths Responds to Medication, Report Says

Doctors at St. Elizabeths Hospital have given antipsychotic medication to Banita Jacks, the Southeast Washington woman accused early this year of killing her four daughters, to get her to open up and cooperate, according to a hospital report filed with D.C. Superior Court.

After two injections of the drug Haldol, Jacks related her sense of "severe loss" over the death of her boyfriend, Nathaniel Fogle Jr., to cancer in 2007 and her daughters' deaths, the report says. She also spoke of homelessness, having her car taken away and losing her dog. After the injections, she interacted with her attorneys, whom she had refused to meet.

The three-page report, filed Tuesday, gives details of Jacks's mental state after she was arrested and charged with murdering her daughters, ages 5, 6, 11 and 16. The report describes Jacks's mood swings and her refusals to cooperate and says hospital staff members have been unable to render an opinion on whether she is mentally competent to stand trial.

"Her lack of cooperation, her guarded and paranoid presentation and her defiant refusal to participate in any evaluation limits our ability to arrive at a conclusion about her competence," psychologist Nicole Rafanello and forensic psychiatrist Nicole Johnson say in the report.

In the report, Rafanello and Johnson say Jacks would not allow doctors to monitor her vital signs. Recently, Jacks caught her fingers in a closed door and refused to let doctors X-ray her hand, the report says.

"Her decision to not speak with staff or not participate in interviews may be due to a psychotic thought process she is unwilling to accept," the report says.

Jacks has refused to participate in mental evaluations needed to determine her fitness for trial. In October, D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick H. Weisberg ordered her to spend 45 days at St. Elizabeths, the District's psychiatric hospital, after she refused to cooperate with a previous court-ordered evaluations.

At that hearing, Jacks told her attorneys to tell Weisberg that she did not want to be medicated. It is not clear from the report whether she ever gave her permission. The report says she expressed a "wish to appeal" after she had been medicated.

St. Elizabeths staff members clearly had difficulty interpreting Jacks's reactions and words.

Once she corrected a hospital facilitator who said she faced 10 criminal counts; actually, it was 12, she told him. Another time, the report says, she smiled while listening to a hospital staff member read charging documents that describe the decomposition of the girls' bodies.

Jacks, 33, is scheduled to appear before Weisberg tomorrow. He could order further testing or set a trial date.

Jacks was arrested Jan. 9 after federal marshals serving an eviction notice at her rowhouse on Sixth Street SE found the bodies of her four daughters. Authorities said the girls had been dead for up to six months. She has insisted that she would not cooperate because her attorneys want to pursue an insanity defense and she wants to plead not guilty.

The youngest daughter, Aja Fogle, 5, was strangled and beaten, according to a 12-count indictment returned by a grand jury. N'Kiah Fogle, 6, and Tatiana Jacks, 11, were strangled, and Brittany Jacks, 16, whom her mother referred to as a "Jezebel," was stabbed, the indictment says.