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Sunday, January 11, 1998 By Brian O'Neill
Thomas Berkelbaugh earned the title of The Disoriented One during last year's Great Pittsburgh Tunnel Escape. The first of the six escapees taken back into custody, Berkelbaugh was a mulligan for the forces of law, giving himself up six days after his escape, at a Houston hospital, where he'd been taken after being found babbling in a bus station.
He's a safe choice for most sympathetic felon when four prisoners go to trial Feb. 20, charged with escape and conspiracy. Whether the jury will find Berkelbaugh not guilty by reason of insanity is a tougher call, but you'd be nuts to bet much against it.
So on the first anniversary of the Great Pittsburgh Tunnel Escape, I met with Berkelbaugh's attorney to ask how in the name of Steve McQueen his man beats this rap.
Chris R. Eyster, son of a Lehigh County district attorney, is working the other side of his late father's street. As a toddler, he was taken to crime scenes and jail interviews. Now, at 37, he's representing the kind of guys Dad put away.
Of Berkelbaugh, Eyster said authorities "are going after him with a vengeance because the escape made the institution look bad."
His fellow escapees say Berkelbaugh was an afterthought; they took him along after the tunnel was dug because they felt sorry for the frail, suicidal man who couldn't defend himself against other inmates. He'd lost his right eye to glaucoma in 1994 and was addicted to the drugs that went around like pop in those escape-friendly days at State Correctional Institution Pittsburgh.
Throw in the anti-depressants he'd been prescribed, Eyster says, and "Berk" was as looney as a 'toon when he crawled through the tunnel. So nutty, when Berkelbaugh's glass eye popped out, he fumbled for it in the dirt and shoved it back in. The others dragged him through when he got stuck.
He'd have been better off stuck. Berkelbaugh, 48 with a bad heart, will never make parole now. For the past year, he's been in a restricted cell in Somerset, allowed out only for showers and an hour of daily exercise. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years for three suburban supermarket heists in 1985, and now he's assured the full ride. (An equal-opportunity felon, Berkelbaugh robbed a Shop 'n Save in Bellevue, a Giant Eagle in Shaler and a Foodland at Century III Mall.)
It's hard to see what Pennsylvania gains by tacking on another seven to 14 years for escape. Taxpayers pay more than $22,000 a year to house the average inmate, and Berkelbaugh's medical bills would jack that number skyward. Nobody would lose sleep if a jury decided he was too nutty to be found guilty. Berkelbaugh long has seemed more hapless than fearsome.
In 1966, while a junior at Baldwin High School, he robbed a Carrick bank between classes and was caught before the last bell. Two decades later, his supermarket spree lasted only eight days before he was caught holding a starter's pistol. Now, 13 years later, he cuts such a pathetic figure that a reporter witnessed an Allegheny County deputy approaching Eyster to ask, "Is Berk OK?"
"He never hurt anybody, physically, in any of his crimes," Eyster argues.
"He was a gentleman robber, if there is such a thing."
There isn't. Nor is there anything to Eyster's argument, already brushed away by a judge, that inhumane prison conditions justified the escape.
But having heard Berkelbaugh's plans to move in with his older sister in Vancouver, Wash., if paroled, here's hoping The Disoriented One reorients himself there when the next century is still young.
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