Jury Asked for Damages in Slashing : Victim Was Attacked in 1982 at Santa Ana Home-Care Facility

Closing out a trial that featured tales of violence, the attorney for a mentally disabled woman who was scarred in a stabbing 6 years ago urged a jury Monday to award damages against the home-care facility where the victim was living during the attack.

Gayle A. Bohmert, 33, suffered severe scars when she was stabbed several dozen times in October, 1982, by a psychotic woman who was also a resident of the small, licensed home-care center in Santa Ana for the mentally and physically disabled.

Her attorney, Lawrence S. Eisenberg, on Monday held the manager of the home partly to blame for the attack, accusing administrator Virginia Harris of failing to supervise and check into the backgrounds of residents or to properly secure the butcher knife used in the attack.

The jury began deliberations late Monday in the courtroom of Orange County Superior Court Judge Claude M. Owens. Bohmert, now living with her family in Missouri, is seeking $26,000 in compensation for medical expenses, along with unspecified damages for pain and suffering.

Eisenberg told the jury that doctors have diagnosed Bohmert as having chronic post-traumatic stress disorder relating to the stabbing.

‘Afraid of People’

“She’s distrustful and afraid of people to this day,” he said.

But an attorney for Harris Care Centers Inc., which runs several home-care facilities for the disabled in the county, said the home’s managers are not to blame in the tragedy.

“There was nothing my client could have done to have prevented that stabbing,” attorney John J. Tasker told the jury. “We cannot guarantee 100% that someone isn’t going to go berserk and stab someone.”

Harris, while refusing to discuss details of the case, said outside the courtroom: “I don’t really think it’s my fault what happened to her.”

Disputing that view, Eisenberg said Harris and other home personnel “ignored the storm signals” that preceded the attack.

The woman who attacked Bohmert, Evelyn La Cour, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the stabbing and is now at Patton State Hospital, Eisenberg said.

The attorney said La Cour had a history of violent tendencies that managers at the home should have known about.

In addition, he said the managers failed to notice La Cour’s personal problems and sexual delusions that were thought to have contributed to the attack.