Years of mental and physical pain chipped away at James Martuscelli so that his wife barely recognized him as he sat, expressionless, on a tree stump in their backyard and held a gun to his chest.

Even as she saw the gunman who hadn’t worked for nearly 25 years after paranoia and bipolar disorder set in, she remembered when he had been the dashing owner of a men’s store who mingled with fashion designers.

“I knew, Jimmy, you’re in there underneath it all,” she said, thinking back to the evening of July 10, 2009.

She dialed 911, hoping he would be taken to a psychiatric hospital.

He ended up in a gun battle.

In a shootout that evening, Martuscelli endangered police and neighbors near his home on Cindy Drive in Sugarloaf Township. He suffered gunshot wounds from which he recovered, but faces charges that could keep him in prison the rest of his life.

His ex-wife, Judi, who now goes by her maiden name, Smith, said the shooting makes him a caricature. To the public, he is a nut with a gun.

Smith wishes people could see his life in context of his mental illness and see him as the man whom she married.

“I guess it’s hard for people to think like I do because they don’t know Jimmy like I do,” she said. During an interview on their back porch, she leafed through their scrapbook, now frayed by a bullet that plowed across the cover.

They met in the early 1970s. Martuscelli ran a men’s clothing shop in Philadelphia; Smith worked as a controller for a clothing business and did some modeling.

There were parties in New York.

“It was always a big splash. You felt like a million dollars, dressed like a million dollars,” she said. Martuscelli conversed with fashion moguls: Bill Blass, Calvin Klein and Pierre Cardin.

“He could pull it off. He was, to use an old word – dashing,” Smith said.

His downturn coincided with a series of traffic accidents around 1985, including a serious one on the Schuylkill Expressway. Smith was in the car for one crash, and his mother for another. The accidents were not Martuscelli’s fault, Smith said, but he felt guilty. Both he and Smith needed a long time in physical therapy to heal their bodies. In some ways, he never recovered.

“He couldn’t go back to work. He loved his job,” Smith said. “He would try so many things to get back. You don’t know how hard he tried.”

His Hazleton-bred work ethic made him ashamed when he couldn’t work, and he believed those closest to him were ashamed of his mental illness.

“Part of the conditioning of our society is to be ashamed of ourselves for these kinds of conditions,” Smith said. “I don’t know what it will take for people to realize mental illness is an imbalance in the brain. There’s no cause for shame. It’s not something you did.”

During the spring and summer of 2009, however, events piled up on Martuscelli before he reached for a gun.

His psychiatrist left town. He lost his driver’s license and became more isolated inside the house where he and Smith had lived for 20 years. He sought to avoid people, so much so that he wouldn’t even mow his lawn. He spent hours watching television, especially war movies and violent shows. He wasn’t sleeping well.

His back throbbed from an old car accident. He depended on morphine to deaden the pain, but hated the drugs and tried to break his addiction. He was in withdrawal from the painkillers and also had gone without psychiatric medications for four days prior to the shootout.

Painkillers had ruined his colon, and he dreaded the surgery to repair it, partly because he had watched Smith live with chronic intestinal pseudo obstruction, a rare malady that prevented her from eating. Her nourishment came from fluids administered intravenously each night. Martuscelli worried, with little medical basis, that he could end up the same way.

At times he lost control of his bowels, his balance and his temper.

Smith, weary of picking up and cleaning up a man who outweighed her by 90 pounds and argued with her irrationally, was divorcing him.

For financial reasons, they agreed to share the house but locked the doors of their separate bedrooms.

Martuscelli stopped caring about his life – abdicating decisions to his wife, saying she was smarter than he was.

Then he tried to end it on April 28, 2009 by swallowing a wad of pills.

The coma lasted three days, but he recovered.

Less than three months later, however, he grabbed a gun.

Martuscelli had never been in trouble with the law, and Smith never worried about him having guns. Sometimes she went with him to target shoots at the Nescopeck firehouse. They both practiced their aim and socialized with the other people who took part. Her husband was less a hunter, more a gunsmith. For him, guns were a puzzle that occupied his hands and mind, she said.

But as she looked out the window on the evening of the shootout and saw him with the gun, she couldn’t fathom where his mind was.

Over the years, she had learned tricks to break him out of a funk: go for a drive, get a pizza together, talk things out.

“This time, he was not responsive,” she said, while remembering his trance-like expression that evening. “I can’t describe it other than waxen.”

Her 911 call and the shots that Martuscelli fired brought an officer from the Sugarloaf police, who summoned reinforcements. Martuscelli had gone inside the house by then, and Smith escaped from the house when police arrived. Officers from Butler Township, Conyngham, West Hazleton, Hazleton and the state police converged around the yard, which is fringed by trees on three sides.

Martuscelli fired for more than an hour and hollered about suicide by cop. Neighbors hid in back bedrooms and basements as police came under fire.

No one was hit, except Martuscelli, who said he wished police had been better shots when he surrendered, with wounds in his side and hand.

After arresting Martuscelli, police found handguns, military rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition stored inside his home.

Since then, Martuscelli has been in Luzerne County prison, where he awaits trial.

He faces several counts of assault and other charges when his case comes before the county court later this year or next year. Smith said he might be sentenced to 15 to 30 years, although she hopes that won’t happen.

“I would just hate to see him lose the rest of his life. He’s had such a hard life already,” she said of Martuscelli, who is 62.

He didn’t want to hurt anyone, except himself, Smith said.

“He was ill. He didn’t know what he was doing,” she said. “All he knew to do was die.”

She couldn’t stop him.

“I knew he was trying to do suicide by cop,” she said.

Since Martuscelli has been in jail he received psychiatric medications and has been weaned off morphine and other addictive painkillers. He takes Tylenol and warm showers for his back pain. He underwent surgery for his colon and experienced none of the side effects that he feared.

Smith thinks it is ironic that he is receiving good care in prison after his care was disrupted leading up to the shooting.

Treatment makes a difference.

“When he is properly medicated, he is a charming man,” Smith said. “He has a lot to contribute to people as a human being.”

She has been writing to him every day, telephoning him four or five times a week and visiting him in prison on Mondays and Saturdays.

She sends him books of poetry.

“We discuss it so he has some stimulation … He is able to understand, read into things, extrapolate. I don’t know many people that can do that, or would be interested,” Smith said.

The poems, letters and chats have brought them back together.

“We’ve become friends again. It rekindled a relationship that I thought was dead,” said Smith, whose divorce from Martuscelli became final in February.

Still, she wants him to return home someday and said he will always need good psychological care.

“That can be arranged,” she said.

Smith doubts that Martuscelli would ever again be subject to the same stresses and circumstances that led him to start shooting.

“I have no fear of Jimmy at all now that this is behind him,” she said.

Police who faced him on that summer night last year aren’t so sure.

“I think he’s a danger to society. We’ve responded to the house several times,” Sugarloaf police Sgt. Josh Winters said.

On one trip to the house, Smith was locked in a room and Martuscelli “was going crazy,” Winters said. When Martuscelli overdosed on pills in April 2009, a gun was 18 inches from his hand when he passed out.

Winters thinks Martuscelli is a danger to Smith, too.

The initial call that police received on July 10, 2009 said Smith was being held hostage, said Winters, who offered Smith advice after her husband took the pills that April.

“I spoke to her many times, gave her different avenues, paperwork on agencies that could help. We tried to do whatever we could to help her while he was in the hospital,” Winters said.

He said Smith seemed most interested then in regaining Martuscelli’s guns from police so she could sell them.

Smith said back then the marriage was collapsing and she thought selling the guns would help her afford a break from Martuscelli. Because of her health condition, she requires medical supplies and treatments that would have hampered her from entering a shelter or other living situation.

“Looking back, there was so much going on, it was like a whirlwind. I didn’t know the proper move to make,” Smith said.

Winters said Martuscelli’s misfortunes don’t excuse the shooting. He made a decision to fire upon officers, he said.

“It’s not the gun doing the killing. It’s the person,” Winters said.

Neighbors faced danger from stray bullets, including those that Martuscelli fired aimlessly through walls, Winters said.

At the police, Martuscelli fired directly.

“He shot at the cops an hour and a half or two hours. There was no suicide by cop. He tried to kill them. We have families,” Winters said. “Why should our families pay if one of us gets shot or maimed?”

kjackson@standardspeaker.com

Rebuilding a broken man

Tags: Butler Township, Josh Winters, car accident, bipolar disorder, back pain, Luzerne County prison, clothing shop

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