PEABODY — He waged a two-year campaign of abuse on his ex-girlfriend and their young son, abuse that started before the boy was even born.
Timothy Burke-Tate, 22, of Peabody pulled his pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs. He showed up at a party and forced her to leave with a knife at her throat. He put out a cigarette on her face. He broke into her home, smashed her television, piled her clothes on the bed and poured bleach over them.
And then, furious that she had moved on and was now expecting a child with her new boyfriend, he threatened to leave their 2-year-old son on a street corner. When she showed up to get the boy, Burke-Tate tried to strangle her, then smashed her car window, covering her and their child with broken glass.
Yesterday, as Burke-Tate admitted to doing all of those things and more, a Superior Court judge raised the possibility that Burke-Tate is a sociopath.
Judge Howard Whitehead sentenced him to five to seven years in state prison, followed by five years of probation, during which the judge expressed hope that "probation can work a miracle. That hasn't been possible in the past."
If it doesn't, Burke-Tate could face up to 30 additional years in prison.
The prison term was the result of an agreement reached between Burke-Tate's lawyer, Christopher Norris, and prosecutor Melissa Woodard.
Woodard described how the series of incidents began in the summer of 2007 and continued through June 2009. After the final incident, when he smashed a car window, spraying glass over his former girlfriend and their toddler, a Peabody District Court judge ruled that Burke-Tate was too dangerous to release on bail. Burke-Tate responded in court by flipping over a table, then challenging the court officers. "It will take all you (expletive) pigs to bring me down," he yelled, before shoving one court officer into a bench.
While being held at Middleton Jail, he encountered his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, there in another case, and beat him, then told the woman that the beatings would continue unless she dropped the charges against him.
Even Burke-Tate's lawyer was forced to acknowledge that the crimes were "disturbing, and that's probably an understatement."
But while "some people would say Mr. Burke is incorrigible. ... I don't think he's beyond hope. I think the system can help him."
Burke-Tate told the judge, "I made my plate. ... It is what it is. I'm doing my time and growing as a man."
Woodard, who persuaded the judge to require Burke-Tate to take part in a domestic abuse prevention program, parenting classes and mental health counseling while on probation, said she's concerned that he has never had any meaningful family support as he accumulated a criminal record starting in childhood.
Woodard pointed to recordings of phone calls between Burke-Tate and his mother, Mellonie Burke, 40, in which she apparently found her son's jailhouse fight "humorous," and later posted comments on her son's Facebook page trash-talking the other man.
As her son was being led out of the courtroom, Mellonie Burke exploded at court officers who asked her to move away from them.
"What do you think I'm going to do, jump you?" she yelled. "He's my (expletive) son."
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