CUERO - An attorney will ask a DeWitt County jury this week to find his client not guilty of stabbing a volunteer firefighter because he was insane at the time.
Kirk Ross Engle, 45, pleaded not guilty Tuesday to stabbing in the stomach on Aug. 19.
Smolik responded on Aug. 19 to the 400 block of West Sixth Street in Yorktown where brush, a couch and a trash can were ablaze.
Smolik testified Tuesday that Engle not only admitted to causing the fire, but did not want it to be extinguished. Smolik said Engle yelled obscenities at him and his fellow firefighters when they tried to extinguish it anyway.
Smolik said Engle stabbed him after he retrieved a water pump.
"I thought I had been punched in the stomach," said Smolik, who was treated at DeTar Hospital Navarro for four days in Victoria, three of which he spent in the intensive care unit.
Smolik's fellow firefighters backed up his account, recalling for jurors how Engle swung a knife with a black blade at them too and asked, "Do you want to die tonight?"
That knife was never found, and it is District Attorney Michael Sheppard's position an insane individual would not have had the forethought to both flee the scene and toss the knife along the way as Engle appears to have done.
In Texas, for a defendant to be found insane he or she must, as a result of severe mental disease or defect, not know that his or her conduct was wrong.
In his opening statements, Sheppard told the jury that Engle was a Gulf Bend Center patient who had been prescribed Lexapro at the time of the offense.
Sheppard suspected Defense Attorney Brent Dornburg would argue that the medication, which treats some mental illnesses, drove Engle to behave the way he did on Aug. 19. But Engle told his Gulf Bend case workers as early as November 2013, before he was prescribed Lexapro, that he would not mind going back to prison. And in July 2014, Engle told case workers he wanted to kill a cop, Sheppard said, adding that Dr. Joel Kutnik, who examined Engle, would also testify that he does not think Engle is insane.
Jurors also watched about an hourlong video of Yorktown Police Officer Joshua Serbin catching Engle about eight blocks from the fire. Serbin and Yorktown Police Chief Paul Campos arrested and transported Engle to the DeWitt County Jail.
In the video, Engle admits his intended target was Campos, and he complains that he wants to go home.
"You ain't going home," Campos says.
"The penitentiary is my home," Engle is heard replying before saying, "I should have gone to the crisis center like I wanted to."
Dornburg waived his right to make an opening statement and did not cross examine any of the state's witnesses Tuesday morning. Dornburg is expected to call his own expert to testify about Engle's mental state when the trial resumes Wednesday.
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Yorktown man accused of stabbing firefighter claims insanity
