Victim’s Son Blames Werewolf Killer’s Mom

SAN LUIS OBISPO (CN) - Days after a murderer who claimed he was a werewolf was sentenced to prison, his victim's son sued the killer's mother, saying she gave him access to the gun.

Eighteen-year-old Robert Barga's mother, Colleen Barga-Milbury, was shot to death in the doorway of her home on May 22, 2013. Her killer, Mark Alan Andrews, claimed he was a werewolf and thought she was a vampire. Andrews pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but convicted of murder and sentenced last week to 50 years to life in prison.

On Friday, Robert Barga sued the killer's mother, Carol Andrews, for negligence and wrongful death.

Mark Andrews was living in his mother's home when he took a lever-action .30-30 rifle from a gun cabinet in his room, knocked on the front door of Barga-Milbury's Atascadero home and killed her.

In his lawsuit in Superior Court, Robert Barga says Carol Andrews "knew or should have known that her son Mark Alan Andrews, who lived with her at the Andrews home, was a diagnosed schizophrenic with a 20-year history of mental illness including psychotic episodes, hallucinations and paranoia coupled with hostile and threatening behavior toward others including his own family."

Despite that history, Barga says, Carol Andrews kept a stocked gun cabinet in her son's bedroom.

Witnesses testified at trial that Andrews thought he was a werewolf and that Barga-Milbury was a vampire. After he killed her, police said, he told investigators that the voice of God had told him to kill her.

Trial testimony revealed that Andrews had been involuntarily committed several times under the state's 5150 law, for being a danger to himself or others. He was committed in 2009 after he accused a different neighbor of being a vampire who had molested him.

Police that time found several bizarre weapons in Andrews' apartment and a list of names, some of them marked "hate with death," according to police reports.

After his release from the hospital in 2009, Andrews moved in with his parents, Carol and Jan Andrews. Jan Andrews was a former psychiatric technician at nearby Atascadero State Hospital, which treats mentally ill offenders, and a gunsmith who once owned a sporting goods store.

During her son's trial, Carol Andrews testified that guns had been in her house for 30 years. She also testified that her son had threatened her with a knife during a psychotic episode.

"Why did you allow the defendant to live in a bedroom that had rifles, given the fact that his mental illness has caused him to be violent in the past?" deputy district attorney Matt Kraut asked.

"The guns were not the most prominent thing on my mind," said Carol Andrews, a retired nurse. "That summer when Mark moved in with us, I was running around trying to find him an apartment. My husband had three surgeries, I was busy doing IV medications at home with him and changing dressings, doing irrigations, all this stuff. I did not even consider those guns."

Under state law, anyone committed under the 5150 statute cannot have access to guns for five years. During the murder trial, Carol Andrews said she remembered reading that stipulation in the paperwork for her son's commitment.

But even after Jan Andrews died in August 2012, the guns remained in her son's room.

Testifying about her son's mental illness, Carol Andrews said he was mentally stable at times, when medicated, "but that can change within 24 hours."

"And even though you say that," Kraut asked, "you allowed him to live in the room with the guns?"

"I didn't allow him to. I just - that is what happened," she said.

According to the suit, filed by attorney, it was "reasonably foreseeable that the entrustment of multiple weapons to her son would pose a danger to others."

Robert Barga, who has autism, was 16 when he returned home from school to find his mother's body inside the front doorway.

Barga's father had died when he was 3, leaving him an orphan after his mother's murder.

He now lives in New York with relatives.

He is represented by Louis Koory with the Mission Law Center in San Luis Obispo.

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