The jury trial for a former Purdue student has been delayed to Nov. 13.
Spencer Au, a former student in the College of Liberal Arts, was arrested in February and accused of assaulting his roommate.
In a pretrial conference Friday morning, a judge granted a motion to push back the trial again, but he expressed displeasure for what is now the third time the trial has been rescheduled.
The pretrial conference is now set for Oct. 12.
Since his arrest, Au has been living in his parents’ home in California. According to discussions during Friday’s hearing, Au has been seeing a psychiatrist as part of conditional bond.
According to an interview of one of Au’s roommates, Au had been suffering mental problems and that "Au talks about his depression but has not been suicidal since last summer. ... Au had been to (Purdue Counseling and Psychological Services) for mental health and (the roommate) said he thought Au was seeing a personal therapist.”
Au was “almost always under the influence of some kind of drug,” the roommate said in the document.
In a later West Lafayette Police report, the arresting officer said he found a bottle of Clonazolam solution, the base component of Clonazepam.
“Au said the drops were a legal substance he bought from irc.bio,” stated the report. According to its homepage, irc.bio is a website that sells legal chemicals and drugs. The homepage also states that the website will be closing soon.
In the same report, the roommate told officers Au would put a few drops of the solution into his drinks and then “pass out for hours at a time.” Along with his use of clonazolam solution, Au was reportedly a heavy user of marijuana and nitrous oxide, more commonly known as “laughing gas.”
Following Au’s arrest in January, police conducted a search warrant on his home and seized 13 guns and the stun gun he used to assault his roommate, according to the returned search warrant. The seized weapons included a revolver, an AK-47 and two AR-15s.
Officers also found 28 grams of marijuana, two plastic bags with handwritten labels of cocaine and amphetamine sulfate, and a blue plastic container containing 100 grams of white powder labelled “tianeptine sodium.”
On Feb. 29, Au was served with a no-contact order against his former roommates. Since then, Au hired attorneys Jeffrey Baldwin and Jennifer Lukemeyer.
According to court documents, Baldwin and Lukemeyer submitted a petition on Feb. 28 to change the residential address, to relocate him to his familial home in Walnut, California.
“He will reside with his mother and father and his brother when he is home from graduate school,” the petition states. "He and his family have ties to the community and it is in his best interest to be with his family full-time.”
The same document states the family would be seeking mental health treatment for Au, and that there had been at least one family member staying in Tippecanoe County with Au since the incident. A petition to seal Au’s mental health records was filed on May 11.
Au has been charged with possession of less than 5 grams of cocaine, possession of a controlled substance with an enhancing circumstance, possession of marijuana, possession of paraphernalia, battery resulting in bodily injury, pointing a firearm at another and criminal recklessness committed with a deadly weapon.
