A Fatal Lapse for Victim of Torment

Before it killed him, the beating that Chadwick Shane Cochran suffered in a Los Angeles jail may have brought back terrifying memories.

The attack last month was not the first time the system failed to protect the mentally ill man while he was in custody, according to a civil rights lawsuit.

Four years ago, the suit alleged, Georgia prison guards choked and karate-chopped Cochran after he was pulled from a class for mentally ill inmates and vomited on an officer’s shoe.

In the suit, the Southern Center for Human Rights accused prison officials of abusing and failing to protect Cochran and several other mentally ill prisoners. The center dropped the suit in January after the prison changed a number of its practices without admitting wrongdoing.

By then, however, Cochran had left Georgia and returned to a life of drug abuse and petty crime, as he struggled with depression and paranoia. He was making frequent trips to state hospitals, but the treatment never seemed to help, his relatives say.

“I loved him so much, and it’s so wrong he had to be killed that way!” Cochran’s mother, JoAnn Moye, wailed as she sat on the living room floor of her Macon, Ga., home, gazing at photos of her son. “It just hurts me so to know he was beat like that!”

In the weeks since his death, Moye and others who loved Cochran have looked back, trying to make sense of how this tormented but sweet man, an amateur rock drummer raised by a strict Baptist minister, could wind up dead so far away and in such brutal circumstances. They say Cochran had never been a threat to anyone, only to himself, and he was often afraid.

In the end, it was his paranoia, possibly triggered by a methamphetamine binge, that landed him at Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, where he was killed.

A woman who had befriended him had lent him a gun -- to make him feel safer. When sheriff’s deputies came to his home after a report that he was behaving strangely and carrying a gun, they took him in.

Three weeks later, two inmates, apparently in the mistaken belief that Cochran was an informant, pummeled and stomped him for up to 30 minutes, sheriff’s officials say. The inmates have been charged with murder and torture.

Sheriff Lee Baca said later that Cochran, 35, had been moved from the cellblock for mentally ill inmates into the general population after he told medical evaluators that he had mental problems, but “not to the level where he couldn’t function,” and he was not on medication. An investigation is continuing.

The killing was the eighth in the jail in two years.

“This is a guy who would have had a shot if he were taken care of in the mental health system rather than get caught up in the criminal justice system,” said Lisa Kung, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

Early Signs of Trouble

Those who knew him best say Cochran’s problems started in childhood, when he showed symptoms of attention deficit disorder and perhaps deeper troubles.

Even as a preschooler, his parents say, Shane seemed bothered by something they couldn’t understand. He would awake in the middle of the night and walk quietly into their room.

“He would just stand there and say, ‘I’m scared, I’m just scared,’ ” said his father, Michael Cochran, who has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Baca and Los Angeles County. The dead man’s young daughter is also a plaintiff in the suit.

Cochran rebelled early against his domineering father, whose ministry took the family around the South and Midwest.

Michael Cochran didn’t allow his children to listen to pop music, go to movie theaters, attend dances, or patronize restaurants and stores that sold alcohol.

But Michael Lance Cochran, Shane’s older brother, said the two of them sneaked around to watch music videos and wrestling broadcasts.

He said he preferred to think of Shane not as mentally ill, but rather “mentally hurt.”

“We’ve been depressed our whole lives,” he said. “He was a good guy with a good heart.”

Shane’s father said his son “didn’t want to be under my authority.” So he punished him. “I paddled his butt, yes I did, and it was black and blue,” he said.

Moye contends that, on one occasion, she saw her husband tie the boy’s hands to a basement pipe and strike him with a board, yelling “demons out!” in an exorcism of sorts.

The father, who has since left the ministry, denies that he tied his son or staged an exorcism. He said that he gave him only a harsh spanking.

“I wish I had never done it,” he said, adding that he had apologized to his son years later and that Shane had apologized for his drug use and crimes.

Both he and Moye said they sought help for their young son. When he was about 12, they took him to a psychologist, until Shane refused to cooperate, his father said. He was placed in a Christian wilderness school, then a foster home at age 14.

Cochran’s foster mother, Barbara Lookenott of Mansfield, Ohio, remembers him well. His five-month stay with Lookenott and her husband, Randy, was a “cooling-off period” for the boy and his parents, she said.

“He didn’t want to mind you,” Lookenott said.

She recalled once taking him to the hospital after he broke his arm playing football. As soon as he was back in her car, he ripped the cast off, she said.

“That’s the kind of kid he was,” she said.

But he was also an endearing, good-looking boy who loved to jump from bed to bed in the furniture store where her husband worked, and who smothered everything he ate in ketchup, Lookenott said.

She recalled that he had the habit of drinking cough syrup, lots of it. He would insist he needed it for a cold, and his parents would oblige him during their visits, she said.

In hindsight, Lookenott said, she wonders if the cough syrup was the boy’s first attempt to ease his inner pain with a drug. Cochran’s parents said they don’t recall his taking the medication.

Good at Getting Caught

Shortly after he left the foster home, Cochran’s own home broke apart. He lived mostly with his mother and her grandmother in Georgia after his parents’ rancorous divorce.

Moye said her son began using marijuana at 18 and later crack. He also started dabbling in small-time crime. He had learned to play drums and was arrested for stealing music equipment from a church.

His main skill as an outlaw seemed to be getting caught. He earned his high school equivalency diploma at a boot camp for low-level offenders.

In the meantime, he met the young woman who would become the mother of his daughter, Skyler. They were together for several years but never married.

Those years were not without upheaval. Cochran repeatedly checked himself into hospitals, his mother said. “Maybe 30 or 40 times,” she said.

And there were more detours to jail.

Now and then, especially when incarcerated, he would take a razor or knife to his wrists, his parents said. “He couldn’t stand to be confined,” Moye said.

Both parents said they took their son to drug treatment sessions. Michael Cochran said he bailed him out of jail numerous times, then adopted a tough-love approach and refused his pleas for money because it would be spent on drugs.

Shane Cochran’s relationship with Skyler’s mother ended, and she married another man. Cochran’s parents said he was rarely allowed to see his daughter. Once, in the company of Moye, he tried to force a visit, and got into an altercation with his ex-girlfriend’s husband. Cochran and Moye were arrested.

He had begun using crystal meth, Moye said, to kick a crack addiction.

His crimes became more bizarre. A newspaper reported that he was arrested when police officers saw him walking down the street in shorts and sunglasses carrying some sort of religious text.

The paper said he apparently had stolen the shorts, sunglasses and book from a home he burglarized. He also made himself a cheese sandwich in the house and took a shower.

After another stint in a Georgia jail and more failed attempts at treatment, Cochran left Macon for Arizona.

“He thought he could get to run from everything,” Moye said. “He’d be down on his knees, praying, ‘God, please help me! God, please help me! I don’t want Satan to take my life!’ ”

In June 2004, Moye put him on a bus to Las Vegas.

It was the last time she saw him.

Good and Bad Sides

Later that summer, Cochran turned up in Phoenix, where he quickly ingratiated himself with people who saw his tender side, his awkward eagerness to please. They gave him work, places to stay and walking-around money.

June Carter and her husband, Carl, were amused that he called himself a Southern “good ol’ boy,” and that he carried a photo of himself sitting in a 1969 Dodge Charger that had been painted to resemble the General Lee car from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

And they were touched by his underlying loneliness.

“He did need friends and people to talk to,” said June Carter, who met him while he was painting a house next door. She and her husband took a liking to Cochran, treating him to dinner at Hometown Buffet and giving him clothes, toiletries and cigarettes. They tried, without success, to fix him up on dates.

Others saw his less-agreeable side. Ray Grdn said he quickly spotted him for a “tweaker” -- a crystal meth addict -- after his brother hired Cochran to paint a house Grdn owned.

Grdn called the Phoenix police after learning that Cochran was staying in a guest house on his property without permission. They arrested Cochran on suspicion of trespassing.

Cochran’s behavior became stranger and stranger.

Charles Wright, who also hired him to paint his house, said Cochran would yell that there were people outside, people out to get him. After some of these spells, Wright said, Cochran would check into a hospital.

It became too much for Wright, who ordered Cochran out of the house. “It’s a scary world he was in,” Wright said.

‘I Told Him I Loved Him’

Cochran’s parents continued to hear from their son during 2004 and 2005. Michael Cochran said he talked to him in August about his resolve to stay clean, and his hopes to be home for Christmas.

“I told him I loved him,” Michael Cochran said.

Moye said she spoke to her son regularly, until a week before he ended up in Men’s Central Jail. She said they had made plans for her to fly out to take him back to Macon on Nov. 3.

He was staying with Gloria Rowe, who had encountered him outside a grocery store, standing in the rain. “Wringing wet, no jacket,” said Rowe, 79.

She put him up in a decrepit trailer behind her Covina Hills house, as she had with other down-and-out young men. “I love being around the young folks, seeing them have fun,” she said.

Rowe said she bought Cochran clothes and shoes and fed him. She learned later that he had been stealing her tools and other property to sell on the street, presumably to buy meth. Rowe found syringes in the trailer after he had left.

She said that explained why he had been so jumpy, unable to sit still. “And he was always, always scared,” she said.

Rowe gave him a revolver for protection.

On a Sunday morning in October, 10 days after he moved onto the property, he told Rowe’s neighbor, Yolanda Nickoley, that someone had broken into the trailer.

He then spotted a drum set near her garage and brightened, his fear lifting, Nickoley said. The drums belonged to her 17-year-old son, Travis King, and Cochran said he would like to come by and jam with him.

Sometime after midnight, Travis heard banging on the walls and knocking on the front door. He went downstairs and found a bedraggled Cochran standing at the doorway.

Cochran had Rowe’s gun in his hand, and he pleaded with the teenager to come out and help him, because somebody was after him, Travis said.

To reassure him, Travis said, Cochran tossed the gun into some bushes. When Travis stepped outside, Cochran hugged him.

Travis asked Cochran what he was high on, and Cochran told him speed, the teenager recalled.

The two chatted for three hours about rock ‘n’ roll, and Travis started playing the guitar, with the volume turned down. Cochran began to sing, and they toyed with some lyrics.

At one point, Travis said, Cochran looked through him and exclaimed, “Shut up, shut up, Bill! See, he thinks it sounds cool!” There was no one there.

“He was like, ‘The demons are out because I’m in a weakened state,’ ” King said.

He said he had to encourage Cochran to leave and went back to bed, but then heard more banging outside. It was Cochran again. He pulled the gun from the bushes, pointed it at him with a smile and yelled, “Ha!” Travis said.

The teenager was not afraid, but insisted that Cochran give him the gun, Travis said. Cochran did so reluctantly, expressing fear of his unseen foes.

Travis’ parents came out to investigate and ordered Cochran to leave. When their son told them about the gun, they called sheriff’s deputies.

Within hours, Cochran was arrested on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and taken to jail for what turned out to be the final time.

Gut-Wrenching News

Shane’s younger brother Adam Cochran got a vague phone message while he was driving in Florida with his wife and her father. He used his cellphone to call the number on the voicemail.

The number rang to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Adam knew instantly that it was about his brother.

“I pulled over and threw up,” he said.

Back in Macon, Moye had to be hospitalized after getting the news. “I just went nuts,” she said.

No sheriff’s deputy was present to stop the assault on Cochran at Men’s Central Jail, but a Macon deputy did attend his funeral in Georgia -- to keep the peace between the parents, who were driven even further apart by Shane’s death.

At the close of the ceremony, Moye hyperventilated and an ambulance came. She was given oxygen after she was escorted away from Cochran’s coffin, which remained closed because of the damage to his face.

“I won’t see him until I die, and I really want to see him,” she said about a week later, sobbing over the photos and a Bible in which her son had inscribed a tribute to her a year and a half ago.

Her face glistening with tears, she pulled out a poem Shane had written:

It’s never easy looking forward through the rain

Traveling backwards with my friend called pain

Torn and tattered from this road called life

Scarred by memories that cut like a knife.

*

Times staff writer Sandy Banks contributed to this report.