Sons Get Prison for Fatal Neglect of Their Father : Courts: Judge cites ‘cruelty and depravity’ of Huntington Beach brothers who are sentenced to four years for letting parent die of septic poisoning on his rotting mattress.

WESTMINSTER —  Two Huntington Beach brothers who allowed their bedridden father to die of septic poisoning on his rotting mattress were sentenced Thursday to four years in state prison by a judge who called theirs a shocking case of “cruelty and depravity.”

Superior Court Judge Luis A. Cardenas handed maximum sentences to Jerry Heitzman, 45, and Richard Heitzman, 49, for involuntary manslaughter. They also were convicted of separate counts of elder abuse. Prosecutors said this was the first elder abuse conviction involving a homicide in Orange County.

“The law does not require that either of you has loved your father,” the judge said. “I don’t think the law requires that you even have liked your father. But the law does require a basic threshold level of care be given by you to your father under the circumstances you both found yourselves in.”

Last month, a jury found the Heitzman brothers guilty in the December, 1990, death of their father, Robert Heitzman. The 68-year-old retired plumber was found dead in the house the family shared. Witnesses at the trial testified that the poisoning resulted from infected bedsores caused by exposed springs from the rotting mattress.

“The vision of your father,” Cardenas told the brothers, “lying in excrement, on a mattress that had been eaten away from the chemicals of his bodily discharge, just paints a picture of cruelty and depravity that I don’t think any of us can turn away from without recognizing that as a picture of severe suffering that must have occurred to your father in his last weeks and days.”

Asking for a maximum sentence for the brothers, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Molko told the judge, was “one of the saddest moments of my career.” The case, Molko said, was “the most horrible tragedy that any of us has ever seen.”

The two brothers simply “didn’t care enough to do the right thing for their father,” the prosecutor said. In the last days of Robert Heitzman’s life, Molko said, Jerry and Richard “stripped him of his dignity.”

Molko said he could think of no other “reasonable explanation” for the neglect but money, the nearly $800 a month in combined Veterans Administration and Social Security payments Robert Heitzman received. The elder Heitzman had suffered a series of debilitating strokes beginning in 1969.

Deputy Public Defender Michael B. McClellan agreed that it was “a tragic case and a sad case,” but argued for a lighter sentence for Jerry Heitzman, calling him a “low-functioning member of the family.”

As the primary care-giver for his father, a man McClellan called “a very difficult person . . . even when he was in good physical condition” and “a bigot,” Jerry Heitzman “carried a very heavy burden.”

Gregory W. Jones, the attorney for Richard Heitzman, agreed that this was “the most tragic case we have all seen,” but said that his client had been “doing the best the he could do, given the cards that were dealt to him.”

Richard was working two jobs to support the household, Jones told the judge, returning home only to sleep, and he was also active in his church.

The neglect of Robert Heitzman, Jones said, the “product of him being a good person, not a callous person . . . Richard was trying to do too many things, too many good things.”

The judge said that “what shocks me, and I think shocks everybody who’s been following this case, is that all you had to do was pick up the telephone--one phone call. That would have taken 10 seconds out of your life.”