El Rio : Girl, 13, Sentenced for Trying to Kill Mother

A 13-year-old El Rio girl was sentenced Monday to the California Youth Authority until her 25th birthday for attempting to kill her mother and shooting at police officers who tried to arrest her days later.

Defense attorney William Brown asked Ventura County Superior Court Judge Steven Z. Perren to send his client to a residential treatment facility before any stint in CYA, but the judge rejected that appeal.

Perren said he did not “sense this welling up of remorse that has been suggested” in psychiatric reports prepared before Monday’s sentencing.

The girl admitted participating in the March 7 attack at an El Rio intersection in which her boyfriend, Nathan Marsh, 17, of Lompoc, shot Catherine Beverford four times in the back of the head.

Beverford, 34, survived the shooting when none of the bullets penetrated her skull.

Marsh and the girl, whose name is being withheld because of her age, drove Beverford to a hospital immediately after the shooting and then fled in her van to Northern California. They were apprehended several days later by Vallejo police after a short gunfight.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Matthew J. Hardy said the girl’s troubled childhood, including an alleged rape by her uncle when she was 8, did not excuse her behavior.

“For whatever reason she has become a very dangerous person,” Hardy said. “The protection of society requires that she be placed in CYA.”

According to psychiatric reports compiled for the sentencing, the girl carried a deep anger toward her mother, whom she blamed for her childhood problems.

Beverford spoke briefly during the sentencing, asking that Perren send her daughter to a single place where the girl could receive treatment.

“It would be more beneficial in the long term,” Beverford said.

Marsh, who pleaded guilty last week to similar charges after Perren ruled he should be tried as an adult, is scheduled to be sentenced July 1.