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Rachel Dovey
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A BROKEN HEART Houston Herczog’s mother, Marilyn, holds a photo of Mark and Houston Herczog at Houston’s 2009 graduation.
Crying for Mercy The family of Mark Herczog, a father killed by his son, pleads for compassion as a court trial looms BY RACHEL DOVEY
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n November of 2011, Mark Herczog wrote a short, desperate note on his calendar for the week of the 21st. It was about his son.
“It said, ‘Get help for Houston,’” his sister Annette Keys recalls. It had been an increasingly difficult year for the Herczog
family, during which 21-year-old Houston seemed to have been replaced by a different person. He had always been shy, but according to his aunt, he now shunned social interaction, waiting until after 11pm to go to the gym so he could work out alone. He stole his mom’s Adderall. He said strange things with an empty, vacant gaze that
his family now refers to as “the look.” In early November, when he crashed his dad’s green Caravan and smashed his head into the windshield, he didn’t check to make sure his passengers were OK. Instead, his aunt, who was in the vehicle at the time, says he asked her about the sandwich he’d placed between them, in the center console of the car.
Houston’s family knew something was very wrong, but they didn’t know what it was. They didn’t know that three psychiatrists would eventually diagnose him with schizophrenia. They didn’t know that two of them would be appointed by Sonoma County Superior Court. Around 1am on Nov. 21, Houston Herczog stabbed his father in the kitchen of his Rincon Valley home, using at least four knives to gash and puncture his body 60 times. He tried to cut off his head. He would later tell a court-appointed psychiatrist that he’d thought he was performing an exorcism with a cardboard version of his dad. When police arrived, he told them flatly, “I killed him.” Mark was declared dead at 2:52am by Memorial Hospital, his face so tattered that, according to the coroner’s report, his right ear was barely attached. He was never able to help his son. Houston’s defense has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, a verdict that would likely allow him to be sent to a maximum-security facility for the criminally insane, such as Napa State Hospital. Three psychiatrists have backed up this claim. On the eve of Houston’s juried trial, however, the district attorney called for a rarely requested additional opinion, which contradicts the others’ assertions of insanity. Herczog faces a possible murder charge that could land him in prison, where his family worries he won’t have access to the treatment they believe he needs. Tragically, the Herczog family has landed in the criminal justice system partly because of their initial reluctance to use it. In 2007, Sonoma County police shot and killed 16-year-old Jeremiah Chass and 30-year-old Richard Desantis during psychotic episodes. Mark Herczog’s daughter, sister and exwife all say Mark refused to call police despite signs of Houston’s escalating violence for fear that officers would shoot his son. As a judge prepares to sentence Houston in a Sonoma County courtroom, Mark’s surviving family is not crying for blood.