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Philip Chism, 25, of Danvers, admitted on Friday, April 26, to attempted murder, assault with intent to murder, assault with a dangerous weapon (cinder block), and kidnapping, the Suffolk County District Attorney announced.
The attack happened in 2015 when Chism was on trial for the rape and murder of this Danvers High School algebra teacher Colleen Ritzer a year earlier, the prosecutor said. Chism was only 14 at the time of the murder. He is imprisoned at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley serving a 40-year sentence.
Chism was being held at a juvenile offenders facility in Dorchester while awaiting trial. During that time, he attacked a female social worker. He had previously pleaded not guilty to the beating.
The 29-year-old social worker said she was leaving the bathroom when Chism confronted her with a pencil in his hand.
The prosecutor explained the savage attack that followed.
When the female clinician came out of the bathroom, Chism stared at her from about a foot away. He placed both his hands around her neck and began to choke her while pushing her back against the cinder block wall in the bathroom. The victim was unable to scream because Chism’s hands tightly gripped her throat. When she managed to get his right hand away from her neck, Chism repeatedly punched her in the face, head and jaw. She screamed as other staffers rushed to help her and restrain him. The victim escaped from the bathroom gasping for air with injuries to her neck, face, jaw and back. Chism began to repeatedly yell, “I’m gonna kill them all.”
She submitted an impact statement for Chism's hearing explaining how the attack had drastically changed her life. She wrote she still wakes up sometimes in the dark of night trying to pry his fingers from her throat.
She called him a "true monster" and asked that the judge keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
True monsters exist out in the world. Philip Chism is a monster, a murderer. I have no doubt that his intention was to beat me into submission and eventually kill me. My recommendation to the courts is that he remain in prison for the rest of his life, locked away without the means to hurt another person. Time will not erase or fix what he has done or how he has affected my life. I have to constantly live with these memories. I accept that. We should not accept nor allow him to hurt anyone else. Please do not give him that opportunity ever again.
Judge Helen Brown-Bryant sentenced Chism to 17 to 20 years to run concurrently with his previous sentence.
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