Troubled Life Led to 3 Deaths

When LaShanda Crozier pushed her two daughters to their deaths off the downtown County Courthouse and followed them down, it ended a spell of economic and personal hardship, neighbors, relatives and authorities said Thursday.

Crozier, 27, had talked of suffering a miscarriage that cost her a job, seeing her boyfriend lose a job, and facing eviction--the threat that brought her to the courthouse, they said.

Hours after reaching an out-of-court agreement with her landlord to gradually pay $925 in back rent, Crozier pushed daughters Breanna, 7, and Joan, 5, from the ninth-floor ledge and then jumped herself.

Her boyfriend, the girls’ father, left the courthouse after the hearing and did not witness the deaths, authorities said. He said Thursday, “I have not come to terms with what happened to my children.” He also said he was angry at Crozier, whom he described as selfish. “She should have called me at work.”

Crozier owed back rent on the $400-a-month apartment unit near Exposition Park that she shared with the girls and their father.

In a hallway outside Courtroom 547 on Wednesday, as they waited for the judge, Crozier and landlord Raul Almendariz tried to negotiate an agreement. He offered to allow the family to stay in their cramped, ground-floor quarters if they would start paying weekly installments of about $150. As an alternative, Almendariz offered to let Crozier out of the lease--and the back payments--if she would move the family out right after Jan. 1.

Almendariz said Crozier wanted to stay, even though a recent rough patch had left the couple with little money.

He said the couple told him that Crozier had spent a few days in a hospital after losing a child to a miscarriage, and that the episode cost her a job cleaning rooms at a local hotel. The boyfriend said that he had lost one of his two jobs because of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus drivers strike and that his other job paid just $250 a week.

“She seemed embarrassed yesterday, about the whole situation,” Almendariz said. “She didn’t try to make any excuses at all. She said she would just like the opportunity to stay in the apartment and catch up on the rent.”

Almendariz said he agreed. Judge Pro Tem Aaron G. Bovshow approved. Crozier signed the court papers and headed outside and into the sunshine with her boyfriend and children in tow.

Stunned family members on Thursday described Crozier as a troubled woman who had struggled economically, emotionally and in a stormy relationship with her boyfriend. They said that in recent years she had occasionally given up custody of the two girls to an aunt, Marietta Snowden.

“She was sometimes unstable,” said Snowden, who lives in the Kern County community of Rosamond. “My niece was withdrawn.”

Snowden said she had custody of the girls from March 1999 until last June, when Crozier took them back. Snowden said she had been trying to retain custody of the two girls, citing her concerns about Crozier’s relationship with her boyfriend, the poor living conditions at the apartment complex and Crozier’s mental state.

But “nobody listened, nobody listened, nobody listened,” she said.

Snowden described Breanna as an outgoing tomboy who was fiercely protective of her little sister. Joan, she said, was shy and quiet, a “pretty little girl who loved to wear high-heeled sneakers.”

Snowden said Breanna sensed there was something wrong with her mother and father. “She said, ‘Auntie, I love my mama, but I don’t want to stay with her.’ ”

Almendariz, like so many others who had crossed paths with Crozier, said that in recent days she had shown no signs of irrational behavior or flashes of anger or depression. There was nothing to signal that she was capable of pushing the two girls off a ledge and then jumping herself.

Between noon and court closing time, however, Crozier became distraught, according to witnesses who say they saw her just before she jumped.

Authorities say that after Crozier and her family left the courthouse and her boyfriend went to work, she returned to the building after 5 p.m. with the girls.

Deputy’s Efforts Prove Futile

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy working at the courthouse got a call about a suicidal woman and tried to “talk down” Crozier. About 5:30 p.m., she was seen throwing two objects toward the ground.

Then, as the deputy was talking to her, Crozier “jumped over,” said Lt. Horace Frank, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman.

Witnesses later told police the two objects they saw Crozier push or throw over the ledge were the two girls.

Both landed on a fourth-floor ledge and were taken to County-USC Medical Center, where they died a short time later.

Crozier landed on the ground and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Los Angeles police continued to investigate the matter Thursday, and court officials reviewed their files to glean hints to what might have prompted Crozier’s actions.

Crozier was described by neighbors as friendly but quiet and somewhat guarded.

Most neighbors at the two-story complex are long-term tenants who speak only Spanish, and said they exchanged few words with the English-speaking Crozier, who moved in about a year ago.

“If you would say hi to her, she would say hi to you,” said one neighbor, Darwin Zelaya, 23. “She’d say, ‘I’m very fine. How you doing?’ ”

Crozier and her boyfriend kept to themselves. And they argued occasionally behind closed doors, neighbors said.

“They had their problems,” said Zelaya, but no more than anyone else in the run-down building a block west of the Los Angeles Coliseum and the USC campus.

LAPD Capt. Charlie Beck said the boyfriend was trying in vain Thursday to come to terms with what had happened.

“He’s doing awful,” Beck said. “How do you even begin to understand the kind of pain that this is causing somebody?

“We will be talking to him again, see if he can put some shred of reason to this,” said Beck. “But he didn’t have anything he could offer. . . . I don’t think there is an answer for this that anyone but she will ever know.”

Penelope Trickett, a developmental psychologist and professor of social work at USC, acknowledged the perplexing nature of cases in which suicidal parents choose to kill their children.

“I think it has something to do with a bond between parents and kids,” she said. “The feeling you are one entity, you and your children, and that if there is no hope for you, there is no hope for the children.”

Landlord Almendariz said he was haunted Thursday by his last image of Crozier.

As they left the courthouse, he had just given her older daughter Breanna a $20 bill and told her to share it with her little sister as a Christmas present. The little girl politely said “Thank you,” and “Yes, I will,” he said.

He said, Crozier seemed a little sad but nothing more.

“I wish I could have talked to her a little bit more. Told her, you know, things are going to be OK, that people have their ups and downs. I wish there was something somebody could have done to help,” he added. “Somebody should have known how depressed she was.”