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Machete killer to serve life term
Wednesday, October 31, 2001 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
BELLEFONTE, Pa. -- Eric Fant faced the death penalty for all but beheading a Centre County convenience store clerk during a robbery last year -- the last of three machete attacks that he said came at God's behest.
His public defenders figured that, with Fant's confession and a surveillance system videotape of the crime, there was slim chance he'd beat the rap.
The Centre County district attorney decided that, with Fant's unrelenting insistence that he was on an errand for the Almighty, any jury that convicted him still would find him mentally ill and spare him the death chamber.
So, District Attorney Ray Gricar and public defender David Crowley cut a deal that had Fant, a 38-year-old drifter from Memphis, Tenn., plead guilty yesterday to first-degree murder and go to prison for life without parole.
"God told me to," Fant said of the guilty plea outside the courtroom.
Fant, imprisoned since his arrest, told Judge Charles Brown he is taking Haldol, often used as an anti-psychosis medication.
"He was well enough to enter the plea," said Crowley, who initially maneuvered toward an insanity defense. "It's a lot better than going off to death row."
"We've avoided the risk of his being found not guilty by reason of insanity," Gricar said.
Fant admitted that in early February 2000, in the three days before he killed middle-aged clerk Avinish Kaushal at a convenience store along Interstate 80, he nearly decapitated a Georgia woman in a fatal slashing, then severely wounded a Tennessee store clerk, the only victim who survived the attacks.
All were strangers; all were robbed and attacked with a machete. Fant said he would plead guilty if called to those states to face charges.
Fant, captured along I-80 in New Jersey hours after the Pennsylvania attack, called himself "the beast" in a tape-recorded confession to police. He said he slashed Kaushal, an Indian national who had arrived in Centre County two weeks earlier, after the clerk didn't answer his question: "Who's your Lord?"
Fant was ordered yesterday to pay $5,733 to Kaushal's widow and grown daughter, now living in New York, to cover funeral expenses and other costs. Outside the courtroom, Fant -- a beard reaching to his chest, a thick shock of hair exploding in all directions from his head -- said he had remorse for them.
But when asked why he did it, Fant shrugged slightly and replied, "God told me to."
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