An abusive past shrouded in secrecy

It was a lunch hour in October when Monica Thomas-Harris called a friend at work with a chilling request.

She was sitting in a car in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Her estranged husband, Curtis Bernard Harris, was meeting her.

“Tami,” she told her supervisor, Tamara Cerven, “if you don’t hear from me, you need to find me.”

For Cerven, who said she had witnessed her friend’s attempts to keep Harris’ anger in check for years, this marked a new low.

“That’s when I really began to get scared,” Cerven said.

Cerven had been documenting Harris’ outbursts. She had urged her friend to get a restraining order.

Thomas-Harris told her: “A piece of paper doesn’t stop the bullets.”

Cerven’s worst fears for her friend came to pass late last week. Thomas-Harris never made it to work Thursday, apparently taken by her husband. The body of the 37-year-old mother of two was found at a Whittier motel on Saturday morning with a single gunshot to the head. Harris was nearby, dead by his own hand.

The killings took place two weeks after Harris had been allowed to walk out of a Pomona courthouse after pleading no contest to two felonies and agreeing to serve 16 months in state prison. He was due to be sentenced Jan. 24. The plea deal was agreed to by a prosecutor and judge even though a Los Angeles County Probation Department report said he was “unsuitable for release.”

The charges marked one of the few times Thomas-Harris turned to authorities for help in what friends and family say had been a long and tumultuous relationship. She often downplayed their problems, laughing off the October incident even after confiding to Cerven later that Harris had had a gun with him.

This week, her father, James Thomas, said he had no idea of the extent of his daughter’s troubles. He said much of what he knows now he has learned from authorities and news accounts since her killing.

In many ways, experts say she was like thousands of other women who have been the victims of domestic violence, trying on their own to manage their abuser’s anger.

“Domestic violence feeds on silence, and that shroud of secrecy allows abusers to commit crimes for many years and get away with it,” said Amanda Turek, the community outreach manager at the YWCA San Gabriel Valley, which runs a shelter and domestic violence hotline.

Friends say Thomas-Harris met Harris sometime in the 1990s at a San Diego nightclub. Like her, he also had a child from a previous relationship.

By then, court records show he had already been in trouble with the law, including a felony conviction for discharging a weapon. In 2000, he was convicted in San Diego County on charges of dealing marijuana and was sentenced to 32 months in state prison.

The couple wed the following year, on a date when prison records show Harris was incarcerated at Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe. A sheriff’s deputy performed the ceremony. The witness listed on the marriage certificate gave her address as the prison.

After their marriage, Harris served nearly two more years before he was paroled in April 2003. Their son, now 4, was born two months later. Within months of his release, the couple had separated, according to divorce papers filed in late 2005.

About the time Thomas-Harris filed for divorce, her husband came to her parent’s West Covina home to talk to her. In a restraining order filed in December of that year, she described him as getting “angrier and angrier” when she refused to open the door to let him in. Thomas-Harris reported that he broke several windows before a neighbor called 911. When he left, she said he warned her that he would see her the next day.

Her father, who was not home at the time, said: “She never confided in me.”

When he asked her if she was having problems, she told him to stay out of it. “Dad,” he said she told him, “I don’t want you to do anything that will get you in trouble.”

After filing the temporary restraining order, she failed to go to court, allowing it to expire weeks later. At the time, Thomas-Harris had just started working at a pet food manufacturer in the City of Industry. Her estranged husband worked down the street.

New to the job, Thomas-Harris was quiet and kept to herself at first, her friend Cerven said. Cerven called her a talented and dedicated employee who brought her children to work when she had to come in on the weekends. But Harris was a problem from the start.

He called her at work constantly, pushing Thomas-Harris into hysterics over the phone and demanding she meet him, Cerven said. She would often see them together outside.

“He was yelling in the parking lot and she would be crying,” she said.

Still, until a few months ago, Thomas-Harris insisted that she had it under control. Even after the October incident, Cerven said her friend insisted she was not in danger.

“She said, ‘He’s not dangerous. He’s not dangerous. He won’t do anything.’ She was in this weird calm,” said Cerven, adding that her friend had told her that she thought Harris had bipolar disorder.

“She wanted to get help for him,” Cerven said.

At one point last fall, Thomas-Harris told Cerven that she had persuaded him to seek medical help. Within days, however, he was back.

On Nov. 16, Thomas-Harris said her husband took her from a West Covina park, eventually handcuffing her to furniture at a nearby motel, according to police. Once again he had a gun. Thomas-Harris later told friends and police that he kept insisting that he knew she was seeing somebody else.

She said he told her: “I know how to make you talk.”

Even then, she did not seek help immediately after he let her go, later telling West Covina police that she believed it would not happen again. Two days later, Harris showed up at her work, took her inside his car, bound her with duct tape and threatened her with a stun gun, police said.

This time, she called for help.

Harris was arrested by West Covina police on Nov. 19 on suspicion of kidnapping, false imprisonment and possession of a firearm by a felon. He was in Los Angeles County lockup until the morning of Dec. 21, when he walked out of court after his plea agreement was accepted.

No one had told Thomas-Harris that he was getting out. She came to the courthouse in Pomona hours later, visibly distraught according to court personnel who saw her. She spent time with a victim’s counselor to discuss a safety plan and possibly seek shelter.

Two weeks later, she didn’t show up to work. Her 15-year-old daughter called her cellphone. She later told police that she could hear Harris screaming in the background. Even then, Thomas-Harris told her daughter everything was fine.

Two days later she was dead.

Earlier this week, Thomas-Harris’ family went to the Pomona courthouse to talk to the prosecutors who had handled her case.

Her father said he was angry and demanded to know why his son-in-law had been freed.

“I wanted to hear from somebody who knew why it was allowed to happen,” Thomas said.

He said Deputy District Atty. Samer Hathout, who was filling in for the prosecutor on the case when she handled the plea agreement, came in at the family’s request. Pamela Booth, who supervises the Pomona branch office, confirmed that the family met with prosecutors but said she did not know what had been discussed. She said her prosecutors would not discuss the meeting since the case was the subject of an internal investigation.

Thomas, speaking from his home in West Covina, said Hathout apologized and told them she had made mistakes. He said she explained, in part, that she had relied on defense attorney Arthur P. Lindars’ characterization of the case, someone she said she had dealt with for years at the court.

Lindars, contacted Thursday, said prosecutors and defense attorneys “rely on each other’s integrity” in crafting plea deals. He said that if Hathout did rely largely on him in making her decision, “it makes me feel worse.”

Thomas-Harris’ relatives said they believe her life was lost because no one in the court that day bothered to do basic checks.

Hathout “took no time to verify or confirm any of the things they were saying,” Thomas said. “I told her two or three minutes on the computer, you could have found out that what the guy was telling you was a lie.”

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andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

paloma.esquivel@latimes.com