Bizarre tale of millionaire Neal Jacobson: Did medication lead to murder?
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A sprawling home, loving wife, twin boys. Life was good — until it wasn’t. Now, Neal Jacobson speaks publicly for the first time in the 12 years since that Saturday in January 2010 when he shot his family to death. From a maximum-security prison in Punta Gorda, he tries to explain how things went so very, very wrong.
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A series in four parts
It was difficult for Neal Jacobson to reach the top shelf of the walk-in closet in his bedroom. At 5-foot-10, he had to stretch, but at least it was high enough that his 7-year-old twin boys could not reach the loaded handgun he had stashed there the night before.
The Smith & Wesson five-shot revolver was not far from an open box of Winchester .38-caliber bullets and a typed, five-page letter dated three days prior. Three Bushmaster rifles were locked in cases nearby.
On the Saturday his boys would celebrate their seventh birthday, Jacobson, then 49, climbed out of his four-poster bed around 6 a.m. and stepped into his closet. Franki Jacobson, his wife of 19 years, lay watching him, still sleepy in a flowered nightdress with a tiny bow on the bodice.
“What are you doing in the closet?” she called to him.
Jacobson stepped out, turned and pointed the gun at her.
“Honey, it’s over, it’s just over,” he said, moving toward his wife. “There’s no other way.”
“I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I want to live,” she pleaded. “What about the boys?”
“Franki, we all have to go,” he replied in a slow, deep voice.
She lunged for the gun. The couple fell to the floor, the struggle knocking out Franki’s front tooth and slicing her index finger.
Jacobson shot her twice in the face, killing her.
He reloaded, slipped extra ammunition and two speed loaders into the front pockets of his denim shorts and walked to the far end of the family’s sprawling Wellington home.
It was Jan. 23, 2010 — four days after the twins' birthday — and they were excited for their party that afternoon: laser tag and go-kart racing at Fun Depot in Lake Worth.
The floor was littered with obstacles: a child’s drum set, play cars, a Wiggles chair, a zoo of stuffed animals.
Jacobson sidestepped the toys and a freestanding whiteboard scrawled in children’s handwriting: “2010 Happy New Year,” it read, surrounded by a sun and stars in blue, green and red marker.
He walked into Eric's room first.
His son lay supine, legs tossed over a Thomas the Train comforter. Soccer trophies lined a shelf, and a giant Spider-Man doll peered down from a tall chest of drawers.
Jacobson shot the child twice in the face, spraying blood to the ceiling. But Eric, gurgling, wasn’t dead.
So Jacobson held a pillow over the boy’s face and shot him twice more.
He reloaded.
In the neighboring room, Joshua was cuddled into his race car sheets, asleep on his left side near a stuffed pink pig and a hand-painted birdhouse.
Jacobson put a pillow over Joshua’s right cheek and shot him twice in the face.
He turned, walked back to his bedroom, past his dead wife and into the couple’s bathroom, where he washed his family’s splattered blood off his hands.
Grabbing the keys to his 2002 GMC Envoy, he returned to the children's rooms.
"Come on, hurry, get up," he said, shaking them. "If you don't get up, I'm going to have to leave without you."
Eric and Joshua could not be roused.
Alone, Jacobson stepped outside into the cool morning air.
But before leaving, he did one more thing: He swallowed an untold number of old Vicodin tablets along with the remainder of the Zoloft and Xanax he had been prescribed only weeks before — pills he later would say caused him to commit the heinous crimes.
“They never did anything in my life other than to make me love them,” Jacobson, speaking from prison, said of his wife and children. “And people have a hard time and say, ‘How can he do that if he loved them?’ But the person that did that to them is not me."
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Neal Jacobson is not the first person to blame a murderous rampage on psychotropic medications.
But, in his case, friends, family members and even his doctors say they cannot shake the notion that the commonly prescribed antidepressants and benzodiazepines he was taking might be at least partially responsible.
No U.S. court has reportedly ever found a drug manufacturer criminally liable for a patient's homicidal actions. But it has happened overseas. And at least one U.S. court has held a pharmaceutical company liable in a civil case.
Now, some medical experts are asking whether pharmaceutical companies and doctors should be held accountable if medication leads to murder.
Next: Why ‘Franki just adored Neal, positively loved him to death’
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Jacobson family murders: What drove a millionaire to kill his wife, twin sons
