Slain Girl’s Mother Gets House Arrest

A Rancho Palos Verdes woman whose attempted-suicide plunge killed her 3-year-old daughter was sentenced Tuesday to a year of house arrest and five years’ probation--a sentence she found too harsh and prosecutors thought too lenient.

“I think I’ve been punished enough,” Roya Dalili, 31, said after a hearing in Torrance Superior Court, as reporters crowded around her wheelchair.

The prosecutor in the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Alex Karkanen, countered: “House arrest? She can’t go to Nordstrom for a year?”

Dalili was convicted last month of involuntary manslaughter after a trial in which she blamed depression brought on by an abusive husband. He has adamantly denied all allegations of abuse.

She jumped from the 10th floor of the Torrance Marriott hotel March 3, 1997. She survived. The body of her daughter, Natalie, was found nearby; the little girl landed with such force that her pink tennis shoes were knocked off her feet.

Prosecutors had sought to convict Roya Dalili of murder, contending that she carried Natalie with her out the window. The defense said that the mother jumped alone and that the daughter followed her.

Roya Dalili survived despite extensive injuries to her pelvis, legs and an elbow. She appeared Tuesday in court lying prone in a long, flat wheelchair, with a flowery pillow under her neck.

Before Judge William Hollingsworth Jr. pronounced sentence, Roya Dalili’s orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Daniel Zinar, testified Tuesday that she will require many more operations to remove a “whole array of hardware” keeping her bones together. He said she will never again walk unaided.

One of her psychiatrists, Dr. Donald W. Verin, testified that she is no longer suicidal. But he warned that she probably would become suicidal again if sent to prison.

Her defense attorney, Alex Kessel, said she could not get the intensive care she needs in prison. And her sister, Farinaz Arabzadeh, said she and her brother, Hamid Arabzadeh, would devote their lives to caring for her.

Then Roya Dalili spoke. She wept while she pleaded for mercy.

On the day she jumped out the window, she said, “I lost my judgment. . . . I loved my daughter with all my heart. . . . I’m so very sorry for what has happened to her.”

Karkanen, meanwhile, said Roya Dalili’s needs for the future were secondary. Of utmost importance, he said, was putting “the victim first.”

Hollingsworth, conceding that it was an unusual case, said he was hoping to draft a “practical solution to a very difficult problem” by punishing Roya Dalili but saving taxpayers the cost of her medical treatments.

The judge stressed that “punishment has to be imposed when a thing of this nature happens,” adding, “I’m not doing this out of a great deal of sympathy for her.”