Woman accused of stabbings at Target found incompetent to stand trial

A woman accused of stabbing four people at a West Hollywood Target store in May has been found mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Layla Rosette Trawick, 34, was ordered sent to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County after doctors agreed that she was incompetent, Shiara Davila-Morales of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said Wednesday.

Trawick, of Antioch, Calif., was charged with four counts of attempted murder and five counts of assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the May 3 rampage.

Police said she brought a butcher’s knife and chef’s knife to the West Hollywood store, where she roamed the aisles talking about her bipolar disorder and randomly stabbing people, including a woman holding a baby. Four people were wounded, one critically.

Trawick was arrested by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy and security personnel.

In interviews with The Times after the attack, friends and relatives of Trawick said she had suffered mental health problems from childhood and had become convinced in the months leading up to the rampage that she was the test subject in a mind-control experiment. They said she had been in and out of psychiatric wards much of her life, including about half a dozen times in the year before the attacks.

Traces of Trawick’s illness emerged when she was 3 in the form of hallucinations, her mother, Sheila Clark, told The Times. When her daughter was a teenager, Clark said, she frequently had to call 911 to prevent her eldest-born from harming herself.

Officers would arrive and take Trawick away under California Welfare and Institutions Code 5150, which allows for involuntary psychiatric hold in cases of imminent danger to self or others. Trawick’s hospitalizations generally lasted about a week, her family said. She would stabilize on medication, but after being released, she would stop taking her drugs and deteriorate.

Several years ago, Trawick lost custody of her young son. In the weeks leading up to the attack, she was living on the street and with strangers, according to an ex-boyfriend. Like many suffering from severe mental illness without the prescription drugs she needed, Trawick often used alcohol and drugs to self-medicate.

Court records show that Trawick had been charged with minor crimes over the years, including public drunkenness, petty theft and vandalism. She also was arrested for misdemeanor assault.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com