Downers Grove man who attacked mom with a hatchet on Mother's Day sent to prison
A Downers Grove man who hit his mother in the head four times with a hatchet on Mother's Day 2017 was sentenced Monday to five years in prison.
"I can't believe I did this. I have no recollection of this," John Flick said to DuPage County Judge Liam Brennan. He also apologized to his mother, his daughter and his sisters. All of them had submitted letters of support to the court.
Flick, 59, pleaded guilty to aggravated domestic battery in July 2018. He lived with his 80-year-old mother on the 4200 block of Earlston Road.
He could have received a sentence ranging from probation to up to 14 years in prison.
Flick had been behaving oddly in the two weeks preceding the May 13, 2017, attack, according to his attorney. He had bought a new car, then reported it stolen to police; it turned out it had run out of gasoline and he had left it on the side of the road. He then chained two cars together to prevent them from being stolen.
He had threatened to slit the throat of his teenage daughter the week before, according to Assistant State's Attorney Lee Roupas.
Family tried twice to get him hospitalized and he was due to report for outpatient treatment at a behavioral-health hospital May 15 of that year.
"Clearly the family recognized something was amiss," attorney Patrick Weiland said. Flick has since been diagnosed as being hypomanic, and has had no problems in jail since he started taking the antipsychotic drug Seroquel and the antidepressant Prozac.
Prosecutors say that in a prosecution-requested psychiatric evaluation, Flick said his mother was hateful, that he blamed her for the divorce from his father, and that he didn't like her influence on his daughter.
"He took a hatchet to her head four times in a brutal, brutal crime scene. It's nothing short of a miracle she survived," Assistant State's Attorney Lee Roupas said.
A sister who came to visit the mother for the holiday discovered her mother's injuries and took her to the hospital. At a bond hearing, the prosecutor said the mother's nose had been split in half.
The mother, now 82, lives in an assisted-living center in Wisconsin.