Student ATTACKS Teacher, Mother Asks For Lighter Sentence!

The Assault on Joan Natich and Brendan Depa’s Arrest

Hey guys, Colin here, and welcome back to Fight for Truth. In this video, we're going to be talking about Brendan Depa. On February 21st of this year, this young man went to school at Montanza's High School in Florida.

At some point, his Nintendo Switch, a video game, was taken away from him. Teacher's aide Joan Natich claims that she was not the one who confiscated the device, yet his anger was wholly focused on her.

The full video of what happened next is so violent, so utterly disturbing, I'm only going to be showing pictures here. In response to losing his video game, Brendan ran into the hallway and began to mercilessly beat Joan with his fists and his feet.

The first hit knocked her out cold, but he wasn't done. He stomped on her unconscious body with heavy black shoes that look almost like military boots in the video. Jumping on top of her, he swings his fists mindlessly, trying to inflict as much damage as he possibly can on Joan.

By the way, maybe I should mention, Brendan was only 17 years old, but he had an enormous 6 '6'' frame. In other words, Joan Natich didn't stand a chance, and he literally beat her senseless. There is no question of what Brendan's aim was.

He wanted to kill her. In fact, when the police came and arrested him, he began to spit in the teacher's general direction and said multiple times to everyone present that if he ever got the chance to see her again, quote, he was going to kill her.

All because someone took away his video game. Thankfully, Brendan was arrested and his bail was set at $1 million, and Joan is still alive, hoping to recover from her injuries fully. And one would hope that Joan would have received all the help she could get, right?

Well instead, she was put on unpaid leave by the school district that she was working.

For.

She has absolutely no income and is forced to live on donations from strangers. As for her injuries, she received five broken ribs, an extraordinarily damaging concussion, and hearing loss. She's on record saying that her speech has not been the same since the attack, and she struggles with constant ongoing cognition issues.

So thank the Lord that her GoFundMe account has received about $106 ,000 since the attack. I assume she's going to need every penny. Brendan recently pleaded guilty to the charges that he faced, and he will be sentenced shortly.

What happened next is genuinely incredible. Naturally, Joan is asking for the maximum of 30 years behind bars. She's not going to contribute any testimony that will lessen that. She said, quote, Everyone who knows me or knew me before the attack knows that I'm a totally different person now.

My whole life was just turned upside down. By contrast, Brendan's mother, Leanne, came out with her first public appearance since the incident, and she asked for leniency for her son.

Watch this.

I am so sorry for what my son did, and nobody should ever have to go through that. But at the same time, please consider that my son has had a hard life, and he's gone through so much trauma in his life.

He has autism. Please show mercy to him.

Now first of all, I want to make it clear. This woman is not guilty of the crime her son committed. Unless some other evidence comes to light, I have nothing but sympathy for what she is going through with respect to that event specifically.

But whether or not her son deserves leniency or mercy from the court is another matter entirely. Let's allow her to explain why she believes he should get leniency. Check this out.

I'm terrified for my child. I, you know, I feel like if he gets sentenced to prison, it's a death sentence for him. He's scared. And to have your child call and cry and say, I don't want to die, it's awful.

So in the clip, she says that her son is scared to die, and she feels like prison for him is, quote, a death sentence. But from my perspective, this is not a good reason at all for him to get a lighter sentence.

You see, before he ever felt scared of dying, his innocent victim, Joan Nadich, probably felt scared to die herself. In fact, had other people not been able to restrain him, Brendan Depa would have gladly sentenced her to death.

And not because she did anything egregiously wrong like he did, but rather because someone took away his video game. So no, the way Brendan feels about prison is not sufficient reason to give him any leniency.

Autism, Behavioral Disorders, and Personal Responsibility

Here's the next clip.

So can I ask, was his autism, was that ever brought in in the litigation of his case and in the plea deal, especially as pertains to the sentencing? Because 30 years in adult prison is a very long time, especially for a 17-year-old kid.

Yeah.

He was direct filed. Originally, he was charged as a juvenile, and two days later, he was direct filed. And no, that was not considered. In Florida, my understanding is that a charge of autism—I'm sorry.

Autism is not a defense. And that it can't even be considered until the sentencing phase.

So there are two points here. One, Brendan reportedly was affected by autism and behavioral issues throughout his whole.

Life.

And two, he was originally charged as a juvenile, but now as an adult. Leanne seems to disagree with the fact that autism cannot be used as a defense in the state of Florida. But from my perspective, I see absolutely no reason why it should be a defense at all.

There are literally thousands of autistic people in the United States, some of whom are severely affected. And to the best of my knowledge, almost none of them attempt to murder people when their video game is taken away.

Now, again, that doesn't mean that his autism didn't play any part. It simply means it's not a good reason in and of itself to give him a lighter sentence. If he can make the decision to understand and play a video game, then surely he can also make the decision to not kill people.

Second, I have no problem with him being charged as an adult. And I don't think anyone else should either. Remember, he's a six foot six male who attacked a defenseless female. He can inflict more damage than many adults could have in a similar situation.

And also, it's not like he was 12. He was only a matter of months away from turning 18. Neither of these are good excuses to give him any leniency at all. This is a misunderstanding of what justice is in this situation.

Here's what she says next.

There are a few things I think that, you know, the audience should know about your son. Autism isn't the only disability that he's living with. There's a host of special needs that your son was coping with and that the school was supposed to be accommodating for.

Let me just go over some of it. There's, of course, the severe autism. And then there's ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Something called oppositional defiance disorder, which is, as it sounds, it makes a child extremely defiant and oppositional to any.

I mean, even getting breakfast can be a battle. Reactive explosive disorder. That's another condition that your son is coping with.

Now, I want to be appropriately careful in how I approach this because I believe there are very real mental health issues that can affect how people act without their choice in the matter. Schizophrenia is a good example.

But to the best of my knowledge, Brendan's legal team has not said that he is insane to any degree or that he was not aware of what he was doing or whether or not it was morally wrong or against the law.

Nobody's claiming that. His mother isn't even saying that. The evidence indicates that he knew he was hurting Joan terribly and that he knew this was not lawful or good activity. He was examined by a professional before he stood trial, and even they said that he was mentally fit to stand.

So honestly, this opposition defiance disorder doesn't sound like an actual disorder to me. At least, certainly not in the same way schizophrenia is. It sounds like he just didn't want to submit to any authority, which isn't necessarily a disorder as much as it's just sin.

And similarly, for this explosive reaction disorder they mention, it doesn't sound like a real disorder to me. It sounds like he just had absolutely no self-control and was willing to hurt people when he got angry and didn't get his way.

Again, I'm not suggesting that all the factors in his behavioral issues were completely within his control. That doesn't matter. Autism could have certainly played a part. But what I am saying is that we need to be very careful because our culture tends to over-psychologize literally everything at the expense of personal responsibility.

If I spend all day yelling at my wife, I can't just say that I have Wife Opposition Yelling.

Syndrome.

And I don't think she would appreciate me acting as though I had no choice in the matter. As Christians, we need to be careful not to call something an unchangeable disorder that God has called a sin to be repented of.

What we call the disease of alcoholism, God calls sinful drunkenness, Ephesians 5 .18. What we call narcissistic personality disorder, or sociopaths, God calls pride and a sinful lack of compassion, Colossians 3 .12.

To be sure, certain sins can and do often become addictions and personality disorders. But that does not make them any less sinful, and it doesn't completely excuse us from moral responsibility. The general trend of Scripture is not to diagnose everything and over-psychologize and make our sin appear lighter with various naturalistic excuses, but rather to recognize sin for what it is, and repent with faith in Christ, Acts 3 .19.

And in turn, we rely on the Spirit of God to sanctify us, kill our sin, and produce good fruit, Galatians 5. But the next clip is where things really start to go sideways, in my opinion.

Watch this.

School Accommodations, Justice, and the Judge’s Role

With all of that list, why did the school even allow a Nintendo Switch to be part of any aspect of his day?

You know, that's something I ask every day, and I don't understand why, that in his IEP, it was stated that in the intensive behavior group home that he was living in, if they ever had to remove it as a consequence, they called in the crisis team.

And the original IEP called for a token economy so he could, you know, to motivate him to do his work, he could earn tokens to then go to like a snack closet. This year, he had a new teacher who, it's not Joan, Joan was not his teacher, she's a para, he had a new teacher who, it was her first year teaching, and she didn't, I don't know if she didn't understand the IEP, if she didn't read it.

So the implication here is that the real problem, or at least a massive contributing factor in what Brendan did, was that the school allowed him to have the video game in the first place. And when they confiscated the game, they did not call in the crisis team.

If only the school hadn't done this, then none of it would have ever happened. That seems to be the implication here. This, again, seems to be shifting the blame. But ultimately, we all know it's not the school's fault, it's not the teacher's fault, and it's certainly not Joan Nadich's fault.

It's the fault of the 17-year-old who willfully decided to brutally attack his teacher because of a video game. And biblically speaking, it is the responsibility now of the civil authority, in this case, the judge, to carry out justice blindly.

Leviticus 19 .15. Unfortunately, there is not a great chance of that happening in this case. You see, the judge who will be giving the sentence is Terence Perkins. He also did the sentencing for the case of Gabriella Allo, an 18-year-old who mercilessly beat a teenager and then used her car to run over a good Samaritan who tried to help.

And of course, this case also had mental health claims in it. And the sentence? Just six years behind bars. And this is the point of the video. Our society needs to figure out what true justice is. And they need to figure it out yesterday.

Biblical Justice, the Sanctity of Life, and the Call to Pray

The fact is, the principles of justice are written to some extent on the hearts of all men, Romans 2 .14 -15. And they are also more fully demonstrated in the Word of God, Galatians 5 .14. Only in a society that has left the path of justice would we see millions of baby lives being taken by the pro-choice movement.

Meanwhile, at the same time, we have a debate as to whether or not a boy who brutally beat a defenseless woman should receive a lighter sentence. It seems like we've gotten this all completely backwards.

So Christians, let's not only pray for godly justice, let's call our country's leaders.

To it.

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