Alone, tortured with his thoughts, for three life sentences

Following a spree of infanticides committed by parents, The Jerusalem Post talks to attorney Ran Alon, whose client Itai Ben-Dror murdered his three children in 2010, and is now under constant supervision in isolation.

By BEN HARTMAN
Ron Alon 370 (photo credit: Ben Hartman)
Ron Alon 370
(photo credit: Ben Hartman)
Alone, under observation and tortured with the thoughts of what he did to his children – this is how Itai Ben-Dror spends his days in prison. Ben-Dror has more than enough time to be alone with his thoughts, having been given three life sentences following his conviction in July 2011 for stabbing to death his three children, all under the age of 10.
Attorney Ran Alon represented Ben-Dror during his trial, and has remained in touch with him to this day.
He added that as far as he knows, Ben-Dror is not in touch with his family, and that other than the psychiatrist, the prison staff and Alon himself, he has no human contact.
“One of the reasons that I continue to speak to him this long after the verdict is that I know that he’s suffering and in real isolation,” Alon said.
Alon said he still represents Ben-Dror in his dealings with prison authorities. He explained that his client has been kept in isolation in a cell with closed circuit cameras from the day he began serving his sentence, not in order to protect him from other inmates, but because prison authorities believe that isolation helps them observe Ben- Dror, who is still in a perilous mental state.
The attorney said that his client still meets regularly with a psychiatrist, and that to this day he is plagued by remorse.
“Every time he talks about what he did he becomes very upset, he cries and never stops thinking about what he did, or about his kids – especially during the holidays,” Alon said Tuesday.
He added that while the court ruled that from a legal standpoint his client was not legally insane or in a severe enough mental state to be declared unfit to stand trial, he was certain that his client was suffering from severe depression and a personality disorder that helped lead to the crime, which took place shortly after he was released from a stay of several months at a psychiatric hospital.
“I have no doubt that he very much regrets what he did and only wishes he could turn time back, but it’s impossible,” Alon said, adding that Ben-Dror is “content with the verdict, and wants to be punished for the rest of his life for what he did.”
On the Shabbat morning of July 24, 2010, Israelis were shocked with the news that Ben-Dror had drugged and then stabbed his three young children to death in one of the most brutal acts of family violence in the history of the country.
Ben-Dror’s name disappeared from the headlines until this month, when a string of horrifying acts of infanticide shocked the country again.
On September 18, Eli Gur, 52, violated a restraining order and snatched his children from his wife’s house in Bat Hefer and raced to Tel Aviv, where he threw Yahav, five years old, and Eden, four years old, off an 11-story building before jumping to his own death. That tragedy took place only two days after Karina Beryl stabbed her two children Igor, seven, and Mira, five, to death in their Jerusalem home before attempting suicide, and only a few weeks after Bashir Najiar of Daburiya went on a shooting rampage in the Galilee town, killing his ex-wife, three of his daughters and a local man before taking his own life with a gunshot wound to the head.