A psychiatrist from a Waterloo hospital testified a 24-year-old Parkersburg man accused of murdering his former high school football coach told doctors he was seeing Satan and hearing voices the weekend before the shooting. Mark Becker is on trial, accused of shooting Aplington-Parkersburg coach Ed Thomas to death in June.
A doctor who met with Becker on a Monday — two days before the shooting — diagnosed him with schizophrenia. That weekend Becker told doctors he was seeing Satan and hearing voices that were telling him to do things. But on Tuesday afternoon Becker told a nurse he was no longer hearing voices and wanted to be discharged. He was allowed to leave the hospitals’ psychiatric unit at about five o’clock that afternoon.
The next morning Becker shot Thomas to death. Testimony in the trial is scheduled to resume at nine o’clock this morning in Butler County.