Social worker slain; client charged
Suspect also stabbed self, police say
NORTH ANDOVER - When social worker Diruhi Mattian got an urgent call Wednesday afternoon that her 19-year-old client, Thomas Belanger, was arguing with his younger sister, she rushed to the apartment to help.
Belanger, a troubled man who filed restraining orders last year against neighbors he believed wanted to hurt him, turned on his 53-year-old therapist, police said yesterday. He fatally stabbed her in the back, police said, and then tried to take his own life by slashing his neck with a knife.
Rushed to Lawrence General Hospital, he survived, but Mattian, mother of two women in their 20s, was pronounced dead.
Yesterday, her daughters, who were too distraught to comment, were preparing to bury the Armenian immigrant, as Belanger was charged with murder as he lay sedated in a hospital bed.
The murder shook social workers at Family Continuity in Lawrence, where Mattian had worked for a decade since graduating from Simmons College School of Social Work and where she was known to be so devoted to her job that she routinely visited families on weekends and holidays. As head of a program for mentally ill children and young adults, the Wilmington woman had often gone to clients' houses at night to help them.
"In any work with human beings, there is a risk that we all take, and I can't tell you how sad I am that that risk hurt Diruhi," said her boss, Earl "Skip" Stuck, executive director of Family Continuity. "She was a terrific person. Her mission was her families."
Stuck declined to describe the relationship between Belanger and Mattian, but said she had worked with the family before.
"Diruhi was very, very careful," he said. "If she had seen a danger, she certainly wouldn't have been there and not without support."
Belanger's lawyer, James Krasnoo, said that Mattian had been treating Belanger for about 10 years. He said Belanger has bipolar disorder and was physically and sexually abused by a relative as a toddler.
"He is emotionally traumatized" by the charges, Krasnoo said. "He can't believe he has been charged with doing something to someone who was such a good friend to him."
Belanger's aunt called Mattian to alert her about the fight, according to the one pool reporter who was allowed into the teenager's hospital room yesterday, when the charges were described.
When Mattian arrived at the apartment, she called the siblings' aunt to ask if she would come and stay with the pair, according to court documents, but the aunt refused and instead offered to take Belanger's sister to her grandmother's house. However, Mattian did not want to leave the teenager alone with the knife, according to the documents.
One moment Mattian was standing in the doorway of Belanger's bedroom, trying to talk to him as the sister worked on a computer in her room, according to court documents. The next moment, Belanger burst into his sister's room, bleeding from his neck.
When police arrived at about 6, they found Mattian kneeling in the front foyer, her head down. Belanger was lying on the floor of a bedroom, and a neighbor was holding a towel to his neck.
At first, police believed Mattian was in shock over Belanger's self-inflicted wound.
But then emergency officials found the wound in her back. She was taken to Lawrence General Hospital, where she died an hour later.
Belanger was not formally arraigned yesterday because authorities were not sure he understood the allegations against him.
He will be evaluated at Bridgewater State Hospital in the next three weeks so doctors can determine whether he is mentally competent to stand trial, Assistant District Attorney John Dawley said yesterday outside Lawrence General.
Belanger's family could not be reached for comment.
Ed King, whose girlfriend lives in the apartment next to Belanger's, said he met the teenager after Belanger's mother asked if her son could watch football with him.
The 51-year-old King described Belanger as imposing in stature but gentle in manner.
"He was 6-foot-1, and he went about 250," said King. "That's why you really noticed how gentle he was, very unobtrusive, very polite. . . . He'd knock on the door so softly, almost like he didn't want to knock on it too hard."
Belanger never mentioned school or work, though he said he wanted to join the Marines. He was shy and spoke little, but made it clear he appreciated the company, King said.
"He was definitely a lonely kid," he said. "There's no doubt about that."
According to court records, the teenager filed a restraining order last March against a neighbor who he said had kicked his door repeatedly, broken in, then tried to hit him and threatened his family.
"I blocked his punch and forced him out of my apartment," Belanger wrote in a childlike scrawl. The judge denied the restraining order.
In October, Belanger returned to court and asserted that a 54-year-old neighbor had threatened to shoot him. This time, the judge ordered the neighbor to stay away from the teenager.
Social workers often go to clients' homes to provide counseling, specialists in the field say. At Family Continuity, Stuck said, social workers help clients with tasks as menial as paying bills or as intense as mediating family conflicts.
"We work with hundreds of families every week," Stuck said. "The agency has been around 25 years, and this has not happened."
Since 2004, two other social workers have been slain on the job, one in the Midwest and one in the South. In 2004, Teri Zenner, 26, was stabbed by her teenage client in Kansas. Two years later in Kentucky, Boni Frederick, 67, was beaten to death by the father of a baby the state had just taken into custody.
"It is not a dangerous field," said Carol Trust, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. "These are rare situations that occur."
Still, she said, most schools and agencies train social workers to protect themselves, from learning how to recognize when a client has become agitated and potentially violent to self-defense techniques that can help them escape danger.
"We see people when they're not at their best," Trust said. "Even when we have all this unique training and all these skills and the resources of the community, we can't always guarantee that there won't be these violent situations, these tragedies."
John Ellement of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com. 