http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10663341/site/newsweek/One Very Wild Pitch
Did drugs make a star hurler rob a jewelry shop?
By Arian Campo-Flores
Newsweek
Jan. 9, 2006 issue - By Christmas day, Jeff Reardon was a physical and emotional wreck. The former star relief pitcher was struggling through a second holiday season without his son Shane, who died of a drug overdose in 2004 and would have turned 22 last Thursday. "I miss you more than ever," Reardon wrote in a November entry to a Web memorial for Shane. To help numb the pain, Reardon, 50, was taking at least five antidepressants, his lawyer says. That was on top of four or five heart medications he was prescribed after an angioplasty operation on Dec. 23.
The day after Christmas, Reardon went to a nearby mall in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. Though he told his wife and two surviving kids that he was
going to buy a coffeepot, instead he entered a jewelry store and slipped a sales clerk a note demanding cash and jewelry and claiming that he had a gun, according to a police affidavit. The store manager gave him $170 in a bag. After leaving, Reardon-who in fact had no weapon-saw a security guard in the parking lot, went up to him and surrendered. "I completely lost my mind," he wrote later in a statement to police. "I flipped on my medications."
The state attorney may or may not see it that way. Released on bond, Reardon now faces armed-robbery charges (even though he wasn't armed, the note claiming that he was meets the legal threshold). The news came as a shock to former teammates, who describe the four-time All-Star as a quiet, generous soul. With career earnings of at least $11.5 million and a big house on a
golf course, Reardon, who retired in 1994, had little reason to rob and no prior criminal record.
But he was sinking deep into depression. Over the summer in Massachusetts, where Reardon has family, he would spend hours in his room with the shades drawn, says his mother, Marion Cavanaugh. "He just couldn't get over" Shane's death, she says, and even began contemplating suicide. Last month, says Cavanaugh, Reardon spent a week in a psychiatric facility. Just before Christmas, a psychiatrist prescribed him three new antidepressants. "He was on too many pills," says Cavanaugh.
That will likely be one of Reardon's main defenses should his case go to trial. His attorney, Mitchell Beers, says he plans to call forensic psychiatrists "to discuss the side effects of the drugs individually and in combination with others." At his Jan. 27 arraignment, Reardon will plead not guilty, says Beers. The Palm Beach County state attorney could still reduce the charges from armed robbery, which carries a sentence of up to life in prison, to robbery without a firearm or theft. Given that Reardon was medicated, had no weapon and immediately surrendered, "he's got some good
facts," says John Thornton, a former prosecutor with no connection to the case. "It's likely some type of a plea agreement will be worked out." That
would be the closer's ultimate save.
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