The Connecticut doctor whose wife and two daughters were tortured and killed in a horrific 2007 home invasion says he now lives in constant fear that something terrible could happen to his new family.
William Petit, who barely survived the attack, described in a rare interview how he lies awake at night terrified about how to protect his new wife and their 10-month-old son, William Petit III.
“That happened last night while I was thinking about the baby. And then I’m thinking about Michaela, thinking about Hayley, thinking about Jennifer. My brain is just thinking all of these terrible memories,’’ Petit told the Hartford Courant, referring to his two dead daughters and slain wife, Jennifer.
“What if something happens to the baby?’’ he said of his new son. “What would you do? What would you think? You want to feel like it didn’t happen. But after a while, then you realize it never goes away.
“It’s always there. It’s shorter sometimes, it’s more contained, it’s less provoking. But it’s always there,” he said.
Still, “I used to have awful weeks and awful days,’’ Petit said. “Now, most of the time, it’s awful minutes and hours.”
The Cheshire family’s nightmare began when drug addict Steven Hayes and accomplice Joshua Komisarjevsky spotted Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, at a supermarket that day in July 2007 and followed her home.
The thugs got in and beat and bound William Petit in the basement and tied Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, to their beds.
Michaela and her mother were raped. Jennifer was strangled.
The intruders then doused the home with gasoline and set it on fire.
Both girls died of smoke inhalation, but William Petit managed to escape.
He quit practicing medicine afterward to focus on the nonprofit foundation he launched in his family’s memory.
Petit remarried five years later and had a son with his new wife, Christine, in 2013.
But even in his best attempts to move on, he found himself paralyzed by grief and shock, Petit said.
“I was dazed, semifunctional,” he said. “I pretty much couldn’t get through the meetings without crying. I felt like I couldn’t do it, but everybody would help me out. I was, quote-unquote, the president, chairman, but I was pulled along by everyone else.”
But “though I don’t think I thought of it until this point, the foundation per se was a good respite,” Petit added.
“When you get involved in doing something, especially doing things to help others, it helps you get better, or at least, maybe it buys you the time to allow yourself to heal on some level, to get the help you need to talk to people for things to settle for your body, to settle for your brain.”
Now, above all, he said, “I don’t want people to forget Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela.
“I want some good to come because they would have done an awful lot of good if they had lived their natural lives,” Petit said. “I want their lives to go forward, and I want to be able to pay it forward for them.’’
Hayes and Komisarjevsky were convicted of murder and are on death row.
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