As Police Sergeant Jerome Jasinski recalled on the witness stand last week, the man was weeping when he entered Detroit's Second Precinct at 2:35 a.m. on May 8. "I want to turn myself in." "For what?" asked Jasinski. "For murder," the man said, as he displayed two handguns tucked in his waistband. "I just murdered my daughter and her hippie friends."
Only minutes before, Arville Garland had shot down his eldest child, Sandra, 17, and the three boys with her: Scott Kabran, 18, Gregory Walls, 17, and Anthony Brown, 16. He might have taken even more victims in the student-hippie residence called Stonehead Manor near Wayne State University had not Mrs. Garland dragged him away. Testimony at his trial indicates that Garland, a stable citizen and a loving father, had been driven to desperation by attitudes of youth beyond his comprehension.
Immense Pride. Garland, now 46, was a Tennessee mountain boy who earned a college degree in education but considered himself inadequate to teach. So he came to Detroit to work in an auto factory, then found his career as a railroad-yard switching engineer. He owned a pleasant house, attended a local Baptist church regularly, joined the Detroit police emergency reserve. Of his four children, Sandy was his favorite, a source of immense pride.
Attractive, bright, a high school graduate at 16, Sandy was in her third semester of pre-med courses at Wayne State last spring. For her 17th birthday, Garland used all his savings to buy her a red Volkswagen; he permitted her to drive it only to church, school and her part-time job as a dentist's aide. Though not a hippie, she had experimented with pot and mescaline. Once she and a friend, Donna Sue Potts, were discovered high on mescaline. Garland forbade his daughter to see her friend, but later he relented. Still, Sandy found life at home intolerably restricted. Last year she left; her father brought her back and threatened to chain her up if she left again.
Last April, still determined to be independent, Sandy and Donna Sue rented an apartment at Stonehead Manor. The seedy building was close to Sandy's classes, bookshops, other student hang outs. But only a day later, her parents picked her up after work and forced her to return home. During the next month, she often stopped to have coffee with Donna Sue on her way to school, and during that time she got to know Scott Kabran, a former high school musician and poet with shoulder-length red hair.
An orphan whose foster mother died when he was six, Kabran spent three years in a military school before dropping out. With him in apartment 9 at Stonehead Manor lived Gregory Walls: black, kindly, holding two jobs and studying scriptwriting at nights at Cass Technical High School. Another familiar figure in the apartment was Anthony Brown, a rootless youth who slept wherever there was a spare bed.
It was not so much to see Kabran as to escape from home that Sandy again moved in with Donna Sue Potts on Sunday, May 3. During the following week, occupants of Stonehead Manor testified, Garland, sometimes accompanied by his wife Martha, visited the building in search of his daughter. She eluded them. Garland questioned her neighbors, encountered infuriating evasions.