Gift of Gab: Slain Woman’s Choice for Protection

Robbyn Panitch decided not to buy a gun.

Through her doors each day came the desperate and delusional, transients with private demons.

It was dangerous but rewarding work for the 36-year-old Los Angeles County mental health worker.

But at 5 feet, 2 inches, the only protection the red-haired Panitch had was a touch of fearlessness and a gift of gab.

“Robbyn could carry on a conversation with a telephone post,” said Dr. Randall Firling, a psychiatrist for the County Homeless Outreach Program, who worked with Panitch for more than a year.

“She would start talking to people that, quite, frankly, I wouldn’t know how to approach,” he recalled. “She really didn’t have any kind of fear.”

But a gun to protect herself from those needing help? No, she told relatives.

“She had decided that she couldn’t do that because she was in the business of trying to help people,” said Mark Panitch, her 42-year-old brother from Yakima, Wash. “She said if she had to be afraid of the people she was dealing with, she should not be doing this.”

What she wanted, said her family, was added security provided by the county, but funding cutbacks made that impossible.

“She had talked to me several times, saying how she had gone to her supervisors and asked for some kind of protection,” Mark Panitch said, “but they told her they county couldn’t afford that.”

Tuesday, a 26-year-old drifter with a 3-inch knife walked into the Santa Monica clinic where Robbyn Panitch worked and stabbed her to death. Panitch’s screams alerted co-workers, who captured her attacker.

As news of the killing spread through the mental health community, relatives and friends drew on the emotions of the day and recalled the woman they knew.

At their house in Palos Verdes Estates, her parents, Allan and Gloria Panitch, recalled their daughter as a compassionate, loving person.

“She liked to work with people,” Gloria Panitch said only hours after the fatal attack, her eyes red with tears. “That is what she did--what she was.”

Her father, pacing, interjected: “It’s ironic that one of the people she was trying to help would do this.”

Panitch, a Democratic Party activist, said politics was partly to blame for his daughter’s death.

The father contended that Republican-inspired budget cutbacks led to a lack of security at county mental health facilities.

“It goes back to Proposition 13,” he said. “It goes back to (Gov. George) Deukmejian. It goes back to (former President Ronald) Reagan.”

Continuing to pace, Panitch added: “They have to kill your daughter; they have to kill your baby for people to realize what’s happening. . . . How was I going to know that my daughter was going to be sacrificed at the budget altar?”

As they spoke, Panitch’s fiance, Tom Flaherty, arrived and embraced the parents.

“This is what you get when you have no funding,” he said bitterly, referring to recent county cutbacks in mental health funding. “This guy has been running around the street. It could have been you, but it was her.”

Robbyn Panitch spent most of her childhood in Van Nuys. She attended high school in Palo Alto after the family moved there. Her father is a contract manager at Hughes Aircraft and her mother is a marriage and family counselor.

After doing civil rights work in the 1970s, she attended Mills College in Oakland and later received two master’s degrees--one from USC in social work and another in Jewish communal studies at Hebrew Union College. She played the flute.

Panitch chose psychiatric social work, her brother said, because “she was really concerned about people who had been dealt a low hand by society.

“She was very dedicated to the idea that everybody deserved a decent shake from society, and she felt that what she was doing was a way of personally helping to put her ideals into practice,” he said.

Worked With Homeless

On the streets of the South Bay area, where she had worked for more than a year, former colleagues recalled Panitch as a dynamo in working with the homeless.

“There were times I told her she should be more careful,” Firling said.

She also helped troubled inmates in County Jail and at Sybil Brand Institute for Women, becoming friendly along the way with many people in the Sheriff’s Department. Her fiance works in medical services for the Sheriff’s Department.

Her brother said Panitch took part in the county’s mobile psychiatric response team. She was among the mental health workers who responded to 911 emergency calls involving people acting strangely.

Her brother said Panitch had been attacked several times by these people, only recently returning to work after back and leg injuries.

A resident of Santa Monica, Panitch was recently transferred to her hometown to work at the county’s Santa Monica West Mental Health Clinic, a pale brick two-story structure in a quiet, tree-lined area dotted with apartments.

Ralph Mitchell, acting district chief of the facility, said Panitch was eager to work with the caseload of transient mentally ill when she arrived.

“She asked to come,” Mitchell said. “When she talked to us, she saw it as an opportunity to work with the homeless.”

Among her tasks at the clinic were manning the “cold weather shelters” where transients go for treatment during poor weather and working as part of the two-person mobile units that check on street populations in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Westwood and parts of Malibu.

A year ago, hiring was frozen at the clinic, and last week, the clinic laid off six of its 12 staff members. Panitch was considering starting a private practice and was looking for an office.

Gloria and Allan Panitch said their daughter, a union activist who decried the layoffs, often volunteered to work overtime for free at the clinic.

‘She Knew’

“She’d volunteer her time because the county would not give her enough time,” her father said.

More time meant more exposure to danger, her mother said.

“She knew,” her mother added. “She told me that she was alone in this office where anybody could walk in.”