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URBANA — A Mahomet man has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for breaking down the door to a residence where his ex-wife was located in 2022 and stabbing, strangling and hitting her with a hammer in front of their then-5-year-old child.
Champaign County Judge Roger Webber handed down the sentence Wednesday to Eric A. Anderson, 42, after he pleaded guilty in May to one count of home invasion causing injury.
In exchange for the plea, the state dismissed one count of attempted murder, one count of aggravated fleeing police and two counts of aggravated domestic battery.
Anderson’s ex-wife testified that he started exhibiting outbursts of sudden rages, screaming and cussing at her, not long after the two married in April 2015. At one point, Anderson allegedly told her that he would kill her if she ever left him.
In June 2021, she told Anderson that she did want to leave, and she physically pushed him away when he yelled at her, the woman said. Anderson then allegedly held her down, slapped her, fled, and minutes later called her to tell her he had tried to kill himself but the gun jammed.
Anderson was admitted to a mental health facility, but his ex-wife testified that he did not consistently attend marriage counseling or psychiatry sessions, and his behavior soon escalated again. In September 2021, she filed for divorce and obtained an order of protection.
By the time they sold their shared home, Anderson had repeatedly harassed her by destroying pieces of furniture, taking remote-control of the house’s heat and outside surveillance system, turning off the power, and sending angry messages or voicemails, the woman testified.
She and their shared child then moved in with her parents in Mahomet.
The woman testified she was woken up in the early morning hours of April 4, 2022, by the sound of loud banging. She went downstairs to find her father standing behind the locked front door, yelling at Anderson to go home while the defendant repeatedly slammed a sledgehammer into the door.
Video surveillance captured Anderson swinging the mallet into the wood at least 20 times. Once he busted down the door, Anderson dropped the sledgehammer and picked up a smaller hammer, the woman’s father later told police.
The woman called 911 around 12:50 a.m. and a recording played in court captured the sound of her screaming as Anderson breaks in, pushes her father down, and chases her around the house while repeatedly yelling “You ruined my life.”
She testified that Anderson hit her once in the shoulder and twice in the head with the hammer, stabbed her in the back with a pocket knife and began strangling her on the floor. She recalled saying that he was going to kill her and Anderson replying “You got that right.”
The woman’s father eventually obtained Anderson’s hammer and hit him twice in the head. The woman looked up to see their 5-year-old child standing in the living room, watching as Anderson, apparently disoriented, walked out of the house and got into his SUV outside.
Various police officers then pursued Anderson in a high-speed chase on Interstate 74. When he finally pulled over near the St. Joseph exit, a sheriff’s deputy deployed a K9 to jump through Anderson’s open driver’s-side window to bite and detain him. He was then brought to a hospital.
Once in custody, Anderson was interviewed by a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Jeckel, in August 2023.
Though Anderson initially reported signs of psychosis, like seeing butterflies, Jeckel determined that the defendant was malingering — he had acted logically and methodically, and could substantially ultimately appreciate the criminality of his conduct. Anderson was not insane.
But the psychiatrist did find that Anderson had suffered from a severe agitated depression that began to escalate around 2020 and through the divorce and fights over child custody and visitation rights.
Jeckel noted that Anderson didn’t stick with the medication prescribed from a mental health facility.
Instead, Jeckel indicated that a local doctor had prescribed Anderson diet pills, which are amphetamines and a bad match for treating rage. Before the assault, Anderson apparently swallowed 120 of them, which is “like hooking up to a car battery,” Jeckel said.
Petitioning for Anderson to be sentenced to 25 years in prison, Assistant State’s Attorney Joel Fletcher not only emphasized the physical injuries that Anderson’s ex-wife incurred, but the lasting mental harm that significantly altered both the woman’s life and the child’s.
Reading from a victim-impact statement, the woman said she still experiences headaches from the hammer-sized dent in her skull, numbness around where she was stabbed, and pain in her toes that were broken when she fell trying to evade Anderson.
While she now feels panicked when she sees any bald man with a beard like Anderson, and must hide in her closet when she hears the banging sounds of fireworks or roofers, the woman said the trauma her innocent child has suffered is worse.
The woman said that her child repeatedly asks her how tall the jail’s fences are, whether they have ladders, and whether her father is going to return. The woman said her child frequently stages plays with her stuffed animals and makes drawings to reenact what she witnessed.
“The pictures always start with a red crayon to cover the clean white paper for the pool of blood,” the woman said of her child’s illustrations.
“She then draws two people lying in the blood, and labels one Mom and the other Papa. And she finishes the drawing with another person on top of me with a knife, labeled Dad.”
Fletcher did not call an expert cardiologist to the stand, but argued that Anderson’s assault contributed to the death of the woman’s father, who died approximately one month after the break-in following an open-heart surgery operation that was put on the books before April 4, 2022.
The woman’s father had suffered two heart attacks before the attack, and his wife — a former emergency room nurse — testified that her husband was showing unusual signs of high adrenaline after the home invasion, a concerning symptom for someone on blood-thinners.
Fletcher ultimately argued that Anderson chose not to take responsibility for his mental illness in the months leading up to the blow-up, the attack was premeditated with him gathering tools, and it was only a matter of luck that Anderson didn’t kill his ex-wife.
Recommending that Anderson be sentenced to six years in prison, defense attorney Brian King noted his client had no prior criminal history and argued that he has high rehabilitative potential now that he’s properly medicated and no longer grappling with a fresh divorce.
“I would do anything to remove or correct the mayhem of events for you. I know ‘sorry’ is not enough and never could be,” Anderson said. “I have tenfold learned in the time I have spent in chains, please allow me to be free again. I could at least be able to provide for our daughter.”
Webber said the most significant mitigating factor in Anderson’s case is his severe mental illness, but acknowledged he cannot predict whether he will continue to comply with the prescribed medications and intensive counseling that Jeckel said the defendant needs to improve.
The judge noted that the imprisonment of a parent negatively impacts their child in almost every case, but the hearing’s testimony indicated that Anderson’s child would be better served with her father not in her life for a significant period of time.
“The court has seen some pretty horrible offenses and this ranks right up there amongst the most gruesome, completely senseless and just quite saddening cases,” Webber, who’s practiced law in Champaign County for 40 years, said.
“The terror and horror that was inflicted on this family by Mr. Anderson is something this court cannot personally understand. I can only imagine and not even imagine very well what this family is going through.”
Anderson faced six to 30 years in prison for home invasion causing injury, a Class X felony. He had credit for 857 days already served in jail and must serve at least 85 percent of his sentence.
