Northwest Indiana News: nwitimes.com

CROWN POINT | After withdrawing the same motion more than a year ago, lawyers for David Maust on Monday filed a "renewed suggestion" of Maust's incompetence to stand trial.

They also asked that a hearing to suppress Maust's statement to police that was scheduled for Thursday and Friday be postponed until the competency question is resolved.

Maust, 49, is being held without bond in the Lake County Jail on three murder charges in the deaths of Michael Dennis, 13, James Raganyi, 16, and Nicholas James, 19.

Their bodies were found buried in freshly poured concrete in December 2003 in the basement of Maust's rented house on Ash Street in Hammond.

Maust faces the death penalty if convicted. That's one reason why his lawyers renewed their contention he is incompetent to stand trial.

In the original motion, Maust's attorneys said because a Cook County court at one time determined Maust to be "unfit to stand trial due to mental disability" and because Maust has a long history of mental problems, including being committed at age 9 to an Illinois state mental hospital, he should be examined by mental health professionals.

Maust spent time in Leavenworth prison for killing a German boy while he served in the Army.

In 1993, he pleaded guilty to the Aug. 9, 1981, stabbing of Donald Jones, 15, of Chicago. After Jones' death, Maust fled to Texas where he stabbed another teenager. He pleaded guilty in Texas to causing bodily injury to a child and was sentenced to five years in prison. In 1982, Maust was extradited to Chicago where he spent the next 11 years in Illinois mental institutions before being judged mentally fit to stand trial in Jones' murder. He was paroled after five years.

Maust moved to Hammond in 2002.

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