COLUMBUS — Brian Lee Golsby’s history of childhood abuse, addiction, mental health issues, and a dysfunctional family spread across generations combined to create a “recipe for disaster,” a psychologist testified Monday as Golsby’s lawyers sought to save him from the death penalty.
A Franklin County jury will begin sentencing deliberations Tuesday in the Feb. 8, 2017 murder, kidnapping, and rape of former Monclova Township resident Reagan Tokes.
RELATED: Golsby guilty of all counts in Tokes murder trial
Bob Stinson, a clinical and forensic psychologist hired by the defense team, on Monday offered a list of factors that he said impacted Golsby’s life. The list including growing up in an abusive and violent household with a drug-addicted single mother, going in and out of the foster-care and juvenile court systems, being abandoned by his father, and suffering brain injuries that have affected him intellectually.
“Any one of these certainly could be damaging,” Mr. Stinson said. “Two of them, three of them, four of them could be really damaging.... It’s rare that a single person would experience all 15 of these things in their lifetime. What I’m talking about here is the cumulative effect.”
Mr. Stinson said records also showed Golsby was raped at the age of 12 or 13 by a man who failed to get anything else from him during a street robbery. He said Golsby has been depressed over the years and once tried to commit suicide.
He said Golsby has done better while in the county jail, receiving regular treatment for the first time that includes anti-psychotic medication.
“Brian had choices, and I’m not telling you he made good choices,” Mr. Stinson told defense attorney Diane Menashe. “But when you take other emotionally damaging factors, or you take other corruptive influences, and you put them behind Brian, now he’s on a downhill skid.
“He’s got no protection in place,” he said. “His choices are almost certainly going to end up in a negative outcome.”
The jury last week found Golsby guilty of all nine charges he faced — a variety of aggravated murder, kidnapping, rape, aggravated robbery, and tampering with evidence counts. The jury’s options for sentencing range from 25 years to life in prison, to death on Ohio’s lethal-injection gurney.
On Friday, Golsby apologized to the Tokes family, who were not there at the time. The family, now living in Florida, is expected to return on Tuesday.
The jury will weigh factors arguing both for and against a recommendation that Common Pleas Judge Mark Serrott impose the death penalty.
Prosecutor Ron O’Brien sought to pin Mr. Stinson down on the choices that Golsby did make the night that he saw Ms. Tokes, a 21-year Ohio State University senior, leave work at the Bodega Café south of campus.
He kidnapped her and forced her to drive him in her car to an ATM where she withdrew $60. He raped her, then shot her twice in the head at Scioto Grove Metropark in the Columbus suburb of Grove City, and drove away with her car.
“Can you tell us what would have been going through his mind when Reagan Tokes asked him to only let her live?” Mr. O’Brien asked.
“No, I cannot say what was going through his mind at that moment,” Mr. Stinson said.
Mr. Stinson had noted that he never asked Golsby about the events of that night because he was hired for the penalty phase based on the assumption Golsby would be convicted.
Mr. O’Brien noted that data gathered from Golsby’s GPS ankle monitor showed that, after he’d raped Ms. Tokes, he drove her back to near where he’d abducted her.
“He could have dropped her off at that point, couldn’t he?” he asked.
“Sure,” Mr. Stinson replied.
“But he made a U-turn and went [on I-71] south to this park in Grove City, correct?” he asked. “And you didn’t ask him what was going through his mind when he made that decision?”
“That’s correct,” Mr. Stinson said.
Contact Jim Provance at jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.
First Published March 19, 2018, 5:50 p.m.