June 04--BEVERLY -- A Gloucester man was found guilty yesterday of threatening to blow up Beverly Hospital last fall, an incident officials say was motivated by the arrest of a Beverly woman on similar charges two days earlier.
Mark Fuller, 61, will spend the next 18 months on supervised probation, with conditions that include mental health treatment and an order barring him from Beverly Hospital, a sentence imposed by Salem District Court Judge Michael Lauranzano following a daylong jury trial.
It was Fuller's own testimony to Salem District Court jurors that may have helped prosecutor Alex Grimes show them Fuller's state of mind when he called the hospital emergency room on the afternoon of Nov. 17.
"You have the defendant's own testimony about where his head is at prior to this call," Grimes said.
Fuller had been involved in a dispute with the hospital for months over what he claimed was a bad reaction to a tetanus shot (which he described yesterday as a "neurotoxin").
Sometime earlier that Saturday afternoon, Fuller told the jury, he had been riding home on his bike when he spotted a copy of that day's Salem News, which included a front-page story about Ashley Galvin, 20, of Beverly.
Galvin had been charged with making numerous threats of harm against the hospital, the public library, and police and firefighters. Her case is still pending.
Fuller said he was sympathetic toward Galvin, perceiving her as disabled, through the story did not describe her as such. He said he viewed the story as an "injustice" and tried to contact the reporter who wrote the story, then an editor, but got no answer.
Then, he decided to call the police to check on the status of his own complaint about Beverly Hospital. When there was no one at the station who knew about his complaint, he called a hospital employee with whom he had been discussing the issue. She was not available.
He called the security department, explaining that he viewed his "mistreatment" as a failure of security.
Then, he decided to call the emergency room, "because that's where the mistreatment originated," he told jurors, under questioning from his lawyer, Kevin Chapman.
Grimes suggested that it was really because he wanted someone to "take to task" that afternoon.
"He's getting more frustrated and angry," Grimes suggested to jurors in his closing argument.
Employee Corey Daras, who took the call, told jurors that Fuller, who identified himself at the start of the call, referred to the newspaper story about the bomb threat.
"He says the (person) in the newspaper has the right idea," Grimes told jurors. Fuller told the worker that he'd "see to it" that he finished the job.
Fuller, in his own testimony, claimed he simply told the employee, "I'll see to it that you're stopped from abusing disabled people."
Asked by his lawyer if he made a bomb threat, Fuller said, "I said you deserve to be sued."
But police offered a somewhat different account. Patrolman Charles Twombly said Fuller kept explaining that "he shouldn't have called, and he definitely shouldn't have mentioned the bomb."
Chapman argued that his client was simply referring to the Galvin case and suggested that the young hospital worker was simply confused.
After his arrest, Galvin spent about a month in custody, deemed too dangerous to release, before he was released on conditions that included weekly reporting to a probation officer.
Courts reporter Julie Manganis can be reached at 978-338-2521, via email at [email protected] or on Twitter @SNJulieManganis.
Copyright 2013 - The Salem News, Beverly, Mass.
