The End of the Yellow Brick Road

There was a different Ann Marie once.

She was slim and outgoing, a beautiful young woman who modeled and marched with the high school drill team.

Her future lay before her like a yellow brick road, and she could hardly wait to walk every glorious mile of it.

That Ann Marie no longer exists.

The one that lives today is a woman trapped in a child’s body, a bloated, explosive, 250-pound psychiatric patient who will spend the remainder of her life in locked rooms.

I told you about that Ann Marie.

She’s Ann Marie Degree, who last week pleaded guilty to interfering with a police officer and was sentenced to time already served in the Riverside County jail.

It ends a case that will linger on the public conscience for years to come.

Now 38, Degree was that first Ann Marie 20 years ago when she suffered ruptured blood vessels in her brain while a student at Huntington Beach’s Marina High. She ended up with the temperament and cognitive powers of a 6-year-old.

Last March, caught stealing candy and a soft drink from a gift shop in the Riverside County Regional Medical Center, she fought a sheriff’s deputy and tried to wrest his sidearm from its holster before being finally subdued.

She was charged with three felonies and booked.

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The public outcry was fierce. The idea of charging a brain-damaged woman with felonies for stealing candy became a high-profile public issue.

Degree had already served 2 1/2 weeks in the county jail before she was released on bail. And last Wednesday, based partially on public outrage, the charge against her was reduced to obstructing an officer in the line of duty, a misdemeanor.

She was released on time served but went from the courtroom back to a psychiatric facility. Her future is confinement.

“We accept the verdict and we’re glad it’s over,” says her sister, Becky Yourex, a registered nurse. “But I still have mixed feelings. Why did it have to go this far?”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Bentley, who prosecuted Degree, says he was merely following the law. Demonized by the media, he refused at first to discuss the case but now says he had no recourse under the circumstances but to prosecute.

Bentley claims there were other avenues Degree’s lawyer, Public Defender John Isaacs, could have taken to keep it out of the criminal system, but did not.

Isaacs says he pleaded with Bentley to drop the case but the D.A. refused. “Based on the alternatives, a prison for the criminally insane or life in a mental institution, this was the best we could do,” he adds. “I’m pleased with it.”

“At least now the case has history,” Bentley says. “Others will know about what she did and what she tried to do. You have to wonder, suppose she had actually gotten the gun?”

When the first Ann Marie ceased to exist, the second Ann Marie’s obsessive personality turned her into a compulsive eater. Her weight ballooned to 250 pounds. At 5 feet 10, she is a formidable physical persona.

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The case remains emotionally charged. Degree, trapped for awhile in the legal system, has been returned to the mental health system. She won’t be cured. She won’t be treated. She’ll be “maintained.”

Bentley says he did what he thought was right, balancing justice with society’s right to protection. There is no question in my mind, or in the mind of Degree’s family, that his was the call of duty, not vengeance.

Given Degree’s size and explosive temperament, she could have caused serious damage. She had the deputy’s sidearm half out of its holster before he could stop her.

It adds chilling relevancy to Bentley’s question: Suppose she had actually gotten that gun?

Becky Yourex is convinced it never should have reached the point where an armed deputy was summoned. A nurse for 25 years who has handled brain damaged patients, she believes that the personnel at Riverside County hospital could have dealt with it. The deputy’s presence, she says, aggravated a tense situation.

Based on that incident, a bill pending in the assembly would establish crisis intervention teams trained to handle people like Ann Marie Degree, who suddenly become unmanageable.

Meanwhile, the child-woman at the center of it all will remain a metaphor for society’s inability to deal with its flawed members, people at once dependent and dangerous.

We mourn for the Ann Marie that was, but are faced, sadly, with the Ann Marie that is, lost at the end of a yellow brick road.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.