Nine years later, punch turns fatal; new charges filed

WEST BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Nearly nine years ago, Desmon Venn threw a single punch at a high-school classmate and put him in a coma. Venn pleaded guilty to assault, spent two months in a boot camp and figured he had paid his debt to society.

A new bill arrived last month when prosecutors filed involuntary-manslaughter charges after the victim died of his injuries without coming out of the coma.

Now 26, Venn could receive up to 15 years behind bars in the death of Zuhair "Steven" Pattah.

His lawyer, Elbert Hatchett, said the charges violate Venn's constitutional protection against double jeopardy, or being prosecuted twice for the same crime. Hatchett also said the state's six-year window for filing an upgraded charge has passed.

John Skrzynski, an assistant Oakland County prosecutor who has handled the case from the beginning, said there is no double jeopardy because Pattah's death generated a new crime, which also rules out a statute-of-limitations argument.

Pattah was 16 and Venn 17 when Venn punched him between the eyes during a melee in the parking lot of West Bloomfield High in 1994. Pattah fell backward, hitting his head on the pavement, which severed his brain stem.

Venn in 1995 pleaded guilty to misdemeanor aggravated assault. In addition to serving time in boot camp, he received two years of probation and was fined $1,000.

On Jan. 8, however, Pattah died at 25 of what the medical examiner listed as complications from the head injury. Venn, now a restaurant worker in the Atlanta area, turned himself in after learning of the new charge. He was jailed on $250,000 bail.

Stephen Schulhofer, a law professor at New York University, said that such cases have occurred from time to time in other states, and that federal courts have ruled repeatedly that homicide charges do not constitute double jeopardy.

He said the Supreme Court has ruled that double jeopardy exists only if the two crimes have the same elements.

Pattah was a Chaldean Catholic whose parents emigrated from Iraq to the United States about 30 years ago.

During the nearly nine years he lay in a coma, his deeply religious family never lost hope that he would wake up, said his sister, 22-year-old Lana Murad. They regularly dabbed holy water on his lips. They left his bedroom untouched.

Murad and her parents stood vigil at Pattah's bedside nearly every day, and she insists that he could hear and understand his visitors. Asked to squeeze a hand, his fingers would gently press into the flesh, she said; when told an emotional story, his always-open left eye would tear up.

Murad insisted Venn should be charged with murder, but the prosecutor said the evidence indicates Venn did not mean to inflict such harm.

According to prosecutors, the fight began after Pattah and another boy traded insults about female relatives and acquaintances.

Soon after Pattah was injured, the school system set up conflict-resolution programs to prevent similar tragedies.