RALEIGH - The mother of murder suspect Drew Edward Planten is blaming the state correction and health departments for failing to prevent her son from taking his life two years ago.

Sarah Chandler, Planten's mother, said her 35-year-old son was not treated with the respect that she thought was due him when he was held in custody at Central Prison awaiting trial in the 2002 slaying of Stephanie Bennett in her North Raleigh apartment.

"It's been hell," Chandler said about her life since Planten's Jan. 2, 2006 suicide. "The arrest itself was devastating, and then to lose him."

The claim is pending in the N.C. Industrial Commission, which reviews many tort damage claims for state agencies. Lawyers with the N.C. Attorney General's Office, who are representing the state correction and health departments, have asked that it be dismissed.

Bennett, 23, an IBM contractor, was found strangled to death in May 2002 in her first-floor apartment in the Bridgeport Apartments near Lake Lynn.

The case went unsolved for years, and police investigators put in hundreds of hours trying to find her killer.

Raleigh police homicide detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor ultimately took a fresh look at the case in November 2004 and began focusing on Drew Planten, a reclusive state fertilizer technician who had lived in another apartment complex a few hundred feet away from Bennett's.

DNA led to arrest

After going to lengths to get a sample of DNA, including enlisting the help of his boss at the N.C. Department of Agriculture to get samples from Planten's work gloves and at his work station, police arrested Planten in October 2005. The DNA matched evidence left by Bennett's killer.

Planten appeared catatonic after his arrest and had to be wheeled in for his initial appearance in front of a judge. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty against him, and Planten was linked to another slaying in Michigan. A gun found in Planten's Raleigh apartment was proved to be the weapon used to kill a 22-year-old woman found shot in her driveway in Lansing, Mich., in 1999. Planten had lived nearby.

In Chandler's claim, her attorney, J. Neal Rodgers of Charlotte, indicates that Planten had a stress disorder and suggested that it worsened when he was kept in Central Prison's safekeeping unit. The unit is used frequently by local sheriff's offices to house inmates who have serious mental health or security issues.

Planten was placed on a suicide watch for two weeks but was then taken off. His attorney, the late Kirk Osborn, said at the time of Planten's death that he had hanged himself with the hem of a bedsheet in his cell.

Chandler said her son described being taunted by guards.

" 'I thought I was innocent until proven guilty, but everyone around here taunts me and calls me guilty,' " Chandler said her son told her.

He did not leave a suicide note.

Bennett's father, Carmon Bennett of Rocky Mount, Va., filed a lawsuit after his daughter's death against Equity Residential, the apartment company that owned Bridgeport Apartments. Bennett accused the complex of failing to properly fix a window that her killer might have used to enter the apartment. Bennett also said the complex did not react properly to reports of Peeping Toms in the area.

That case is under appeal.