FBI to Probe Homeless Woman’s Slaying

The FBI launched an investigation Monday into last week’s fatal shooting of a mentally ill homeless woman by a Los Angeles police officer.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael J. Gennaco said he asked for the federal probe to determine whether the LAPD officer used excessive force or violated the civil rights of a 54-year-old woman, who was a college-educated bank employee until mental illness forced her onto the streets, according to her only child.

“The allegations that have been made in this case warrant a federal investigation,” said Gennaco, who oversees civil rights prosecutions in the Justice Department’s Los Angeles office.

Margaret Laverne Mitchell, a 5-foot, 1-inch, 102-pound woman who had lived on the streets around Hancock Park for several years, was shot once in the chest Friday after she allegedly lunged at an officer with a 13-inch screwdriver.

Several community and police activists have questioned why the officer did not use nonlethal means, such as pepper spray, to subdue Mitchell, who police stopped so they could ask whether she had stolen the shopping cart she was pushing.

As is their custom, LAPD officials said they are investigating the incident.

“The public should feel confident that this incident will be thoroughly investigated and reviewed not only inside the department but outside the department, as well,” said Cmdr. David J. Kalish, the LAPD’s spokesman.

On Monday, Mitchell’s son, Richard Mitchell of Long Beach, said his mother was never violent but had begun a slow, inexorable descent into mental illness about five years ago.

His mother, he said, was a bright, happy and articulate woman who loved to play golf and attend Sunday Mass. She raised him alone after his father died when Richard was a child.

Margaret Mitchell, then a bank employee with a college degree, would take her son to his Little League games and Big Brother events after work and on weekends, Richard Mitchell said. She also sent him to Kansas City on occasion so he could spend time with his maternal grandparents.

Richard Mitchell, who was set to identify his mother’s body at the county morgue Monday, said his mother had heard voices in her head for years, but resisted his attempts to convince her to seek treatment because she did not believe she was ill.

“I was trying to get help for her, but it was near impossible,” said her son, a sales clerk at a Home Depot in Long Beach. “I tried so hard . . . but they basically tell you a person has to ask for help. But if a person’s sick and doesn’t think they need it, how can you get them help?”

Richard Mitchell, 35, said he described his mother’s symptoms to doctors and was told she was probably a paranoid schizophrenic who could have benefited significantly from medication. In the last several years, Margaret Mitchell occasionally lived with her son and other relatives, and also stayed at church shelters. But she always wound up back on the streets, growing ever more distrustful of those trying to help her.

Desperate Son Sought Help

Increasingly desperate, the son repeatedly contacted police in Los Angeles and Pasadena and pleaded for help in committing his mother so she could receive help, Richard Mitchell said. He was told that the police couldn’t intercede until Margaret Mitchell either hurt someone else, or herself.

At 4:20 p.m. Friday, near La Brea Avenue and 4th Street, Richard Mitchell’s worst fears were realized.

According to police accounts, LAPD Officers Edward Larrigan, 27, and Kathy Clark, 29, were on bicycle patrol when they approached Mitchell about her shopping cart.

Police allege that Mitchell immediately became hostile and threatened to kill the officers. The officers got off their bicycles and tried to calm her, they said, but she continued to threaten them with her screwdriver. At some point, a motorist intervened, unsuccessfully urging Mitchell to put down the screwdriver.

She tried to flee and officers chased her, they said. A short distance away, the officers allege, she turned and lunged at Larrigan, trying to slash him with the screwdriver. In an effort to avoid being struck, Larrigan stumbled slightly and started falling to his knee. Larrigan--who police say felt threatened--fired once, mortally wounding her.

Police said the bullet entered the front of Mitchell’s chest and came out her back. The bullet had an upward trajectory, which police say supports the officer’s account that he was falling to the ground.

As part of their internal investigation, LAPD officials will determine whether the officers’ drawing of their weapons was appropriate, whether they used good tactics and whether the use of deadly force was proper.

Kalish said the officers’ decision to draw their firearms instead of pepper spray or batons is a “judgment call depending on the threat.” In this instance, Kalish said, events occurred very quickly, which may have limited the officers’ options.

One high-ranking LAPD official, however, said investigators will have to “take a real hard look at the officers’ tactics” in this case. The official--who spoke on condition of anonymity--said Larrigan may have created the situation in which he felt his life was in danger by following the woman too closely.

Although Mitchell was well known among people who live and work in the area, Larrigan was new to the bike patrol and did not know her. His partner was uncertain whether she knew Mitchell, Kalish said.

Mayor Richard Riordan sent a letter to Police Commission President Edith Perez and interim Inspector General Deirdre Hill on Monday supporting a comprehensive investigation of the shooting.

“I trust that the offices of the Police Commission and the inspector general will fulfill the Christopher Commission mandate of ensuring that the people of Los Angeles receive a thorough, independent account of the events,” the mayor wrote.

“I look forward to getting the facts--both from the LAPD and from your offices--before any conclusions are made on the fate of the officers and the operations of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Commissioner T. Warren Jackson said the civilian panel will “take a hard look at this one.” He noted the heightened public sensitivity to allegations of excessive force in the wake of abuse accusations being leveled against the Riverside Police Department and other agencies in connection with recent officer-involved shootings.

At a Los Angeles luncheon Monday, Acting Assistant Atty. Gen. Bill Lann Lee said reviewing police misconduct cases has become one of the Justice Department’s top priorities. Since 1993, more than 300 federal cases involving police officers were prosecuted nationwide, he said. Cases like the Riverside shooting of Tyisha Miller can create tense relations between the community and police, Lee said.

“Suddenly, what could be a routine encounter can become a deadly clash,” he said.

Community activists, who have called for independent reviews of the shooting, said they hope the LAPD’s training programs will be examined to determine whether officers are adequately prepared to deal with the city’s mentally ill and homeless. Kalish said officers receive extensive training on such issues, but he could not immediately provide specifics.

Mental health experts said the shooting underscores another problem: That current mental health laws make it too hard to treat those who are suffering from mental illness who will not agree to seek help themselves.

“People will say maybe she was homeless because she wanted to be homeless,” said Carla Jacobs of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a nonprofit outreach organization. “That is a bunch of crud. She was homeless because she was mentally ill.”

Richard Mitchell agreed with that sentiment.

“This was a very smart woman,” he said. “Something happened to her to make her this way.”

Memorial Is Dismantled

By Monday morning, a makeshift memorial built over the weekend was all but dismantled by employees of a car dealership near the corner where she was shot.

A shopping cart that one friend of Mitchell’s said was hers remained at the scene, but was pushed toward the street and against a newspaper box. The flowers and stuffed animals placed at the scene were inside, including a teddy bear, and a few votive candles surrounded the cart.

“She liked stuffed animals; the funnier the better,” the friend, Que Carroway, said of Mitchell. “She wouldn’t laugh out loud. But she’d just smile.”

Carroway, 48, said he had been living on the streets in close proximity to Mitchell for at least the past year. But he said Mitchell was “a loner” who kept away from the handful of other homeless men and women who lived in the area just off the busy thoroughfare, and that she was very protective of her cart and her blankets.

She slept mostly in a bus kiosk in front of a nearby Jack in the Box restaurant, Carroway said. “She didn’t bother nobody, she didn’t panhandle, she didn’t beg, borrow or steal,” said Carroway. “She didn’t talk much. You couldn’t get more than three words from out of her mouth.”

But Mitchell never lost her maternal instinct, according to Carroway. When he got food poisoning last year, she took care of him, buying him medicine and sitting with him until he got better.

“I called her mom,” Carroway said.

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Times staff writer Joseph Trevino contributed to this story.