Follow up article with more details.
A father's failure: How 1 ruined life became 2
Jill Porter
Philly Daily News
LAWRENCE DUGAN Sr. sits with his arms folded on a table in the visitor's center of Delaware County Prison - until he gets to the critical moment in his story.
Then he lifts both arms over his head, clasps his hands together, one palm clenched around the other - and demonstrates how he held a knife in the air before plunging it into his son's chest.
"I hit him so hard," he said quietly.
"I could feel it. I could hear it, the squishing. It was the sickest thing."
Dugan, 52, has been in prison since Aug. 29, when he attempted to kill his son, a heroin addict who'd tormented him for years with his abusive and depraved behavior. Lawrence Dugan Jr., 25, who police said has a long and violent criminal history, survived.
Dugan is being held on $500,000 bail, waiting for the court to appoint a lawyer to represent him.
I'm here to talk with Dugan because I'm morbidly fascinated. What, I wonder, could drive someone to such a desperate act?
He's a man who has worked his whole life - 65 hours a week at a pizza parlor after his father died when he was a teen, he said; more than 30 years at the U.S. Postal Service, supervising two dozen workers in his last job at the main post office.
"I loved working; I'd like to go back to work," he said.
The hardworking employee-turned-attempted murderer? How does it happen?
So many families suffer with defiant, troubled and sick children. How does it get to the point of attempting to resolve it with a six-inch fishing knife?
"I wasted my whole life on that kid - that's how I feel," Dugan told me, speaking evenly, his rheumy blue eyes glancing away.
His son was a one-time gymnast, choirboy and gifted student who was transformed into a "demon" as a teen, he said. He became a truant and then a drop-out, an abusive addict who made life at home unbearable.
"There was a lot of turmoil in our house," Dugan said.
Dugan took his son with him when he separated from his wife 10 years ago, thinking he'd spare her and his three other children any more torment, thinking that things would get better for all of them, he said.
But things got worse. His son cursed him, stole money from him, pawned his belongings, wrecked his cars, turned their apartments into drug dens.
Why did he tolerate it?
"Guilt," he said. "I felt guilty. I felt - where's he going to go? I guess I was fearful of him a little bit, too."
Then there was the poverty. Court-ordered child support took so much of Dugan's paycheck that he and his son lived without furniture, often without food, becoming ill and drifting from place to place, he said.
Dugan began drinking more and more heavily, spending his nights at the corner bar, going home to pass out before getting up to repeat the cycle.
In fact, you get the sense, sitting in this neat and well-lighted room at the prison - where life is calm, orderly and predictable - that this is the most serenity Dugan has ever known.
"I feel safe," he agreed.
By the end of July, Dugan's life was so unbearable that he took leave from work.
He said he attempted suicide by swallowing 55 pills - not for the first time in his life - but managed only to make himself violently ill.
"I've been a depressed person all my life, but pretty much harmless," he said.
Then his son stole his DVD player. He found a bag of heroin in their apartment on West Chester Pike. And he trooped across the road to Upper Darby police.
He told them about the heroin. He told them his son said he wanted to get a gun so he could "go out like Scarface" and kill cops. Surely he could be arrested?
Instead, Dugan said, he was told to go to court and get a stay-away order or commit his son to a mental hospital.
He returned home, more desperate than ever.
"I went to sleep on the couch and woke up at 4:30, 5," he said.
He found a heroin needle in the bathtub. His son was passed out, wrapped tightly in a blue blanket, "like a zombie."
"He was laying there. It was like he wasn't my son. He was shaking and making noises.
"I was going crazy in my mind. I was freaking out. I said, I can't take this anymore."
He saw the knife. He picked it up and stood over his son for two long minutes, he said. He made the sign of the cross. Then he plunged it into him.
"I went nuts. I started hacking at him and screaming, 'You ruined my life!' "
The two struggled as he "hacked at him" again and again.
"I went to finish him off and something in my head said, 'Stop. This is crazy.'
"I saw blood on him. He looked like my son again."
Dugan dropped the knife, walked outside and asked the first person he saw to call police.
He said he still loves his son, but "I never want to see him again. I exorcised him from my life."
The stabbing was another form of suicide, I think, an escape from a hell Dugan couldn't bring himself to terminate voluntarily.
"I guess I wasn't strong enough," he said about his role as a father.
In fact, the most jarring thing Dugan said during the hour-and-a-half we talked was that when he was stabbing his son - when he was wrestling this bigger, stronger, younger man, when they were reeling across the bloodied apartment - he felt like he was finally in charge.
"I felt like a father," he said. *
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