Homeless woman gets probation and housing after incident during fatal skid row shooting
A mentally ill homeless woman charged with assault for raising an officer’s baton into the air during a 2015 fatal police shooting on skid row was sentenced Wednesday to three years of probation, her attorney said.
During the hearing, a Los Angeles County judge approved a treatment program for Trishawn Cardessa Carey, who also will get a subsidy for full-time housing, said Milton Grimes, Carey’s attorney.
“She was as gleeful as a little schoolgirl,” Grimes said of his client upon learning she’d get a home. “I’m very pleased.… It’s time to give her a chance.”
The sentence brings to a close a case that drew sharp criticism of the L.A. County district attorney’s office from Grimes and some mental health activists, who said prosecutors were overzealous in filing serious felony charges against someone who needed treatment, not incarceration. Carey, 35, has schizophrenia.
“I was always offended by the filing of a felony on her,” Grimes said, sighing.
Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey said the filing prosecutors didn’t have “the full picture” of Carey’s mental illness when they filed the case because they hadn’t received some medical reports.
The case happened in tandem with — and was largely eclipsed by — the controversial killing of Charly Keunang, a Cameroonian immigrant who was shot by Los Angeles police on March 1, 2015.
The killing drew national and international attention after a bystander who witnessed the incident posted a video of the shooting on Facebook. The footage shows Carey, who was standing nearby, grab a dropped police baton from the ground and raise it into the air for a moment.
That action, prosecutors said at the time, constituted an assault with a deadly weapon on an officer. The charge paved the way for Carey — who had earlier convictions — to face up to 25 years to life in prison under California’s three-strikes sentencing law.
Grimes said in a court filing that his client’s previous strike cases were directly tied to her mental illness. His report described the crimes as a 2002 robbery in which Carey punched the victim in the head and a 2006 assault with a deadly weapon on a shopkeeper who had asked Carey to leave the store. The “weapon,” he said, was a ceramic figurine.
In February, the L.A. Police commission ruled that the officers were justified in shooting Keunang. Officers opened fire when Keunang reached for a rookie patrolman’s holstered gun during a struggle, the commission concluded.
On the eve of Carey’s trial in March, the district attorney’s office agreed to reduce her felony resisting-arrest charge to a misdemeanor and to drop the more serious charge, assault with a deadly weapon against a police officer, if she agreed to probation.
Join the conversation on Facebook >>
In March, after Carey took the plea deal, a D.A. spokeswoman said prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the strike allegation “in the interest of justice.”
Lacey said the filing prosecutors may never have filed the strike allegation if they’d had all of Carey’s medical information at the time charges were filed.
“I think they would have taken a closer look,” she said.
Once the office understood the scope of Carey’s mental illness, Lacey said they began negotiating with the defense.
“While we knew she didn’t belong in state prison, we knew just releasing her to the streets … that’s not something that’s going to work,” Lacey said, adding that she didn’t believe Carey would have gotten treatment if the charges had been dropped.
“We used the criminal justice system to get treatment ... the Cadillac of treatment,” Lacey said.
Although her office hasn’t yet made concrete changes in how prosecutors handle cases involving the mentally ill, Lacey said that was high on her priority list.
“I’m committed to retraining my prosecutors about mental illness,” she said.
The process has taken a long time to research, Lacey said, adding that she has gone to other prosecutorial offices asking for examples of how they do things. No real templates seem to exist, she said.
ALSO
Lawmakers consider a last-minute effort to make child death files secret
Bay Area father and two sons shot after mother’s anxious 911 call
California board allows water districts to set their own conservation targets
Follow me on Twitter: @marisagerber
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
