Comment by: Tre Benson, Blue Line Radio
Paul Dwayne Cummings' defense lawyers tried their best to keep the 24 year old murderer off of death row by talking about his troubled past. Paul Cummings grew up with Pearline and Paul Ransom in Hoke County where according to various school personnel Cummings stood out as a well behaved above average student.
But Pearline, Paul Cummings' mother, recounts a different history of violent
beatings administered to both Cummings and her on a frequent basis by
Paul Ransom, Perline's husband. Mental health experts testified for the
defense that it was that violent upbringing that caused Cummings to suffer
from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
formerly and colloquially called shell shock (this is a World War One
term), battle fatigue (World War II), and operational exhaustion (Korean
War), is a term for the psychological consequences of exposure to stressful,
life-threatening and traumatic experiences. Symptoms include nightmares
and flashbacks, sleep abnormalities, extreme distress resulting from personal
"triggers", and emotional detachment with the possibility of
simultaneous suffering of other psychiatric disorders. Experiences likely
to induce the condition include rape, combat exposure, and childhood physical
abuse. Unlike brief reactive psychosis, PTSD is a chronic condition.
Perhaps Paul Cummings real reason for being the way he is, is because
of his genetic make-up. The DNA structure within his every cell that links
him to disturbing, violent fascinations, and both drug and alcohol dependency
issues causing serious consequences. Certainly if teachers from his middle
school days remember him as polite and popular then how could he have
turned so dangerous due to some domestic violence and abuse suffered his
growing up life? Paul Dwayne Cummings was predisposed for a criminal life,
just ask Paul's grandfather - Jerry Cummings.
Jerry Cummings killed his own uncle in 1966, he pled guilty and said he
must have done it because he was so drunk perhaps that's why he can't
remember doing it. He was sentenced to prison for 1st degree murder and
spent a good deal of time in prison after that. Jerry must have been released
from prison sometime before 1985 because he was arrested for DWI in Hoke
County on October 26, 1985. Paul would have been close to 6 years old
and perhaps at onetime met his grandfatherJerry.
Jerry's parole was not revoked for his DWI conviction and on August 15,
1986, Jerry Cummings, Paul Cummings grandfather,
murdered his neighbor, Jesse Ward, in a premeditated act because of a
dispute about a dog. He shot and killed Ward in Ward's home next door.
Paul Cummings stabbed his own next door neighbor in Wilmington, NC, on
October 4, 2002, 16 times and tortured her for her bank card PIN number,
just prior to her to bleeding to death on the lonely floor of her livingroom,
as he drove off to the nearest ATM machine in his 62 year old dying neighbor's
mini-van. Jane Truelove Head struggled with Cummings, defending herself
the best she could. Ms. Head was always generous, would have done anything
for anybody says her brother Eddie Lyons of Raleigh, NC, yet Paul Cummings
was living out his destiny and took rather than asked.
Just like Cummings took from his kind neighbor, 5 weeks earlier Cummings
took from cab driver Eula Caldwell the night she drove him home from the
Whitey's el-Berta Motel. Caldwell recalled the terror she felt having
Paul Cummings razor sharp knife pressed against her neck as he took her
cash and jewelry.
After Ms. Head's death it didn't take police much time to gather information
from some of the neighbors of the Dogwood Mobile Home Park where Cummings
and Jane Head both lived. The entire neighborhood knew it was Cummings,
it had to be him, no one else is evil enough to do such a thing they said.
How is it that an entire neighborhood can spot evil like that which Cummings
portrayed, yet just a few years earlier teachers spoke highly of his manners
and intellect? What happened to this young man to have set him on his
murderous path? Was it drugs? He did admit to using crack cocaine and
drinking excessively but what caused him to even do those things?
Cummings lawyers, in order to attempt to save his life from state execution,
played the "victim of child abuse" card, in the New Hanover
County Courthouse, labeling Cummings as mentally defective and unable
to stop his horrible behavior due to his being beaten and kicked around
by his mother's husband. But the prosecutor Ben David and the jury didn't
buy it. It is this kind of defense tactic, played much too often, that
is a slap in the face of the psyche's of hundreds of thousands of law
abiding citizens that have suffered similar upbringings. Sadly histories
of domestic violence are all too frequent in our society and to the credit
of each and every victim's human spirit, the overwhelming majority of
these individuals have not only recovered but live productive and normal
lives. It is tragic that anyone, lawyers, therapists or the media attempt
to use someone as deviant and destructive as Paul Cummings, exemplifying
him as a poster child, a product of domestic violence to try and someday
gain his freedom. Paul Cummings is the product of a bad seed rather than
domestic violence, faulty DNA engineering. Predisposed to violence due
to his bloodline heritage and not whether or not he was frightened by
his father as a child.
I can only dream of the day when the government gives me a hefty financial
grant to study why people commit such heinous acts of violence when 99.9%
of others do not. In that dream I would begin my study by looking at the
family tree of Jerry and Paul Cummings. It would be the next best thing
to studying identical twins, in that it would prove that propensity for
criminal behavior, extreme criminal behavior, is hereditary. Not learned,
not provoked by poverty or culture, but festering away inside violent
individual's DNA.
Sure this is a simplistic diagnosis and an admittedly shallow study of
a very serious topic. But when you have grandfather and his grandson both
sitting on death row for separate and apart crimes, crimes committed almost
20 years apart, you do have reason to suspect and examine clinically,
a coincidence or evidence of important social and human behavior. How
can we identify and treat the potential criminal? I don't know but perhaps
the answer sits on death row.
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