A North Charleston man charged with murdering five family members faces time in a mental institution, instead of prison.

Neighbors say they watched Michael Simmons sit outside his home, while the dead bodies of his wife and her four children lay inside.

"I feel for the family because they lost five. Not one, five. A mother and her four kids. It's heartbreaking," said Sharleyne Dozier who lives behind the victim's home.

Two years later, friends and family are searching closure and instead find discomforting news. Medical experts have diagnosed Simmons with dementia. He claims to not remember his past nor have an understanding of the charges against him.

"This doesn't happen very often. I can probably count on one hand how many times this happened in a 25 year period and never in a case of this magnitude," said 9th Circuit Deputy Solicitor Bruce DuRant.

Medical experts for both the prosecution and the defense agree Simmons is mentally unstable. But an evaluation held within a week of the murders found Simmons was coherent at the time of the crime.

"Number one, I'm skeptical of psychiatry in general. Secondly, I'm skeptical because this was something that developed while he was incarcerated," said DuRant.

Simmons will now spend the rest of his life in the care of a state mental institution instead of prison.

"It just doesn't seem to be fair. It don't seem like justice played its part," said Jockey Myers who knew the victims.

If Simmons is ever rehabilitated he can be re-tried at any time, but there's one penalty he'll never face, the death penalty.

"We had looked at this case potentially as a capital case from the beginning and encountered several problems with that to begin with," said DuRant.

Simmons was determined mentally retarded when he was 18. The Supreme Court has ruled no one with a history of mental illness be put on death row. Mental health evaluators have also told both the court they don't believe Simmons condition will improve, making the chance of him ever being tried, very slim.