Lashaun Ternice HARRIS
Classification: Homicide
Characteristics: Harris reported hearing voices telling her to send the kids to heaven
Number of victims: 3
Date of murders: October 19, 2005
Date of arrest: Same day
Date of birth: 1982
Victims profile: Her three boys, Trayshawn Harris, 6; Taronta Greely Jr., 2; and 16-month-old Joshua Greely (only the body of Taronta was recovered)
Method of murder: Threw her three children into the San Francisco Bay where they drowned
Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Status: A jury convicted LaShuan Harris of three counts of second-degree murder on January 16, 2007. The next day, a judge declared her criminally insane and ordered her hospitalized for 25 years to life
Court upholds Oakland woman's murder convictions
The Associated Press
July 2, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO—A state appeals court has upheld the second-degree murder convictions of an Oakland woman who authorities say threw her three young sons into San Francisco Bay five years ago.
A jury convicted LaShuan Harris of three counts of second-degree murder in 2007. A judge later declared her criminally insane and ordered her hospitalized for 25 years to life. Authorities say Harris, who was 23 at the time of the killings, reported hearing voices telling her to send the kids to heaven.
The First District Court of Appeal said on Wednesday that prosecutors should not have been allowed to have two mental health experts examine Harris. Those experts concluded that she knew her children would drown.
But the court said those exams did not affect the jury's verdict.
Harris's attorney, Neoma Kenwood, says she plans to appeal.
Mother Ruled Insane In Children's Drowning In Bay
Ktvu.com
January 18, 2007
A young mother who claimed she tossed her three young sons to their deaths in San Francisco Bay to send them to heaven was declared criminally insane Wednesday by a judge, sparing her a possible life sentence.
The rare ruling came a day after jurors found Lashuan Harris, 24, guilty of second-degree murder in the drownings of her three boys on Oct. 19, 2005.
Defense lawyers argued that Harris was schizophrenic and borderline mentally retarded and that she was convinced she was acting on orders from God when she plunged 6-year-old Trayshawn Harris, 2-year-old Taronta Greely Jr. and 16-month-old Joshua Greely into the bay.
Judge Ksenia Tsenin agreed with the defense, saying Harris "was incapable of knowing or understanding the quality of her acts."
Harris will be sent to a mental hospital indefinitely instead of state prison. She can be released if doctors find her legally sane.
The decision nullifies the jury's guilty verdicts on three counts each of second-degree murder and assault of a child causing death. She would have faced at least 25 years in prison for those crimes.
Harris waived her right to continue the sanity phase of the trial in front of the jury and instead chose to have her case argued to Tsenin. A majority of insanity defenses fail because the defendant has to prove they didn't know what they were doing was wrong.
In her videotaped confession, Harris described how she struggled with two of her boys as she stripped them and plunged them from Pier 7 in an area where tourists stroll along the waterfront. Her youngest boy laughed, thinking it was a game.
One of the bodies was recovered, but the others were never found.
Harris was placed in a psychiatric hospital six times between February 2004 and August 2005 and her mother warned a social worker that she would hurt her children the day they died. But the social worker didn't believe her, defense lawyer Teresa Caffese said.
San Francisco Police Officer Michael White, among the first on the scene, testified during the trial that Harris appeared "very calm" as she walked away from the pier with a stroller filled with her children's clothes.
"It seemed like nothing was bothering her," White said. "She was in a different place."
The jury deliberated more than nine days before reaching all verdicts.
One juror, Anjal Pong, said after Tuesday's verdict that the jury quickly decided that Harris was not guilty of first-degree murder, but were equally split between convicting her of second-degree murder or manslaughter.
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris said in a statement that the case "was tragic for all involved".
Mother in murder trial had been in the hospital
She did not receive proper treatment, defender says
Jaxon Van Derbeken - SFGate.com
November 27, 2006
An Oakland mother accused of hurling her three young sons into San Francisco Bay had been hospitalized six times in the 20 months leading up to their deaths but never received proper treatment, her attorney said on the first day of the trial Monday.
Lashuan Harris, 24, faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment without parole if convicted of first-degree murder in the Oct. 19, 2005 slayings of Trayshawn Harris, 6; Taronta Greely Jr., 2; and 16-month-old Joshua Greely. The children were thrown over the railing on San Francisco's Pier 7. Only the body of Taronta was recovered.
The eight-man, four-woman jury first must determine whether Harris is guilty of murder and a separate charge of assault on a child under 8 causing death. If Harris is found guilty, a second phase of the trial would determine whether she was legally sane or insane at the time of the deaths.
In court Monday, Harris was calm, sometimes smiling while her family periodically wept.
She had told police hours after the incident that she threw her children into the bay because God had ordered her to send the children to heaven and that she was caught in the midst of "spiritual warfare."
Assistant District Attorney Linda Allen, acknowledging that the jury would have sympathy for a mentally troubled, single mother, said in her opening statement that Harris nonetheless knew what she was doing when she stripped her children of their clothes and tossed them into the water.
"It was willful, deliberate and premeditated -- she thought about what to do," Allen said. "She deliberated over this decision, even though she was mentally ill."
Harris' attorney, chief deputy public defender Teresa Caffese, showed family photos of Harris with her sons and outlined Harris' struggle with mental illness.
She said that Harris grew up as a shy child in Oakland after her family came moved from Mississippi. At 15, she became pregnant by a 21-year-old man. Her mother wanted to press charges for rape, but Harris welcomed the child and her family felt she had never been so happy, Caffese said.
She described her client, who had worked as a certified nursing assistant, as a devout woman and a good mother, who kept her children well-clothed and fed and who "didn't have a mean bone in her body."
But Harris struggled with "disease lurking within her," Caffese said. That illness surfaced in 2002, when family members saw her arguing with people who were not there, exhibiting unprompted outbursts of laughter and acting out a second personality.
After suffering alleged domestic abuse at the hand of the children's father in 2003 -- a charge he denies -- Harris was first hospitalized in Feb. 19, 2004, while pregnant with her third son. She talked about "giving her babies to Jesus," Caffese said. She was released without ongoing mental care, Caffese said, and soon started to smell dead bodies and hear voices.
Four days later, she was sent back to the hospital for paranoia and talking about "spiritual warfare," and was released the next day. She went home with her mother, but was back in the hospital the following month after threatening to jump out of a window, her attorney said, and was released seven days later, again without ongoing treatment.
Harris was hospitalized again that month after wandering around one night, trying to jump out of moving cars and speaking in sentence fragments. She was released a week later with a referral to an outpatient clinic in Oakland, Caffese said. In the spring of 2005, Harris went to stay with her sister in Jacksonville, Fla., but was soon hospitalized, talking about spiritual warfare and repeating the phrase "reverse the curse."
Her mother brought her back to Oakland, where she was hospitalized after threatening suicide. She was released in July 2005, Caffese said, "without any ongoing mental health treatment."
Harris started living in a Salvation Army shelter but her symptoms returned. The night before her children died, she heard voices telling her to sacrifice them, the attorney said.
Yashpal Singh testified Monday that he was strolling with his two children near the waterfront on the day of the killings and saw Harris appearing to chase her oldest son around the pier.
"He was shouting, 'No Mommy, no Mommy,' " Singh said. "She was chasing him and taking the clothes off. I assumed she was changing him. We didn't realize what was going to happen."
She then threw the first boy into the water, Singh testified. By the time police arrived, Harris had loaded the children's clothing into a stroller and was pushing it away. When an officer asked about the children, Harris replied that they were OK, and "they are with their father."
Woman who threw three kids in SF bay on trial for murder
By Kim Curtis - SFGate.com
November 12, 2006
San Francisco (AP) — LaShuan Harris and her three children took a train from Oakland into San Francisco on Oct. 19, 2005. She bought the little boys hot dogs and they walked along Fisherman’s Wharf.
It was an unremarkable scene among the hordes who flock daily to the city’s tourist hub. Then the day turned sinister.
Harris undressed the three boys, ages 6, 2 and 16 months, and dropped them one at a time over the low railing and into chilly San Francisco Bay.
She knew they couldn’t swim and thought she was sending them to heaven. God had commanded her to sacrifice her three boys, her most precious possessions, Harris later told psychiatrists. Passersby said she seemed dazed, disoriented.
Police arrested the 23-year-old mother as she pushed an empty stroller away from Pier 7.
Harris was charged with three counts of murder and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her case is scheduled to go to trial this week; if convicted, she faces life in prison.
Now 24, Harris remains locked up in the psychiatric section of the San Francisco County Jail. Public defender Teresa Caffese calls her the rare client who “doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”
Her family says Harris is mentally ill and needs to be treated in a mental institution, rather than incarcerated in a prison. But prosecutor Linda Allen says that’s a decision for a jury to make.
Legal experts say proving legal insanity is always a tall order.
“The burden of proof is on her,” said Pete Kossoris, a former Ventura County prosecutor. “She has to show that by reason of some mental defect or disease, she didn’t know the nature of what she was doing or that it was wrong.”
During pretrial hearings, Harris sat in court smiling slightly, eyes downcast. She laughed and talked to herself; she sometimes rocked back and forth. At least three mental health professionals have diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic. She’s also borderline mentally retarded with an IQ of 69, according to her lawyer.
Caffese contends Harris never intended to murder her children.
“She was trapped inside an overwhelming delusion, one that kept telling her to take her kids and ‘put them in the water’ to send them to Jesus,” Caffese said in a recent court filing. “And that is what she believes she did.”
She said Harris believes her children are in heaven — her youngest is now potty-trained, her eldest in school. She sends God postcards written in crayon.
The case is a tragedy, concedes Allen, the prosecutor, but Harris must nonetheless be punished for her crime.
“She walked around the pier and cried because she loved her children, showing that she understood she had killed them and that they were gone,” Allen said in court documents. “Even if defendant thought she was sending her children to heaven, she was doing so by killing them.”
What brought Harris — a poor, young black woman existing on the margins of society — to the pier on Oct. 19, 2005, is itself a tragedy.
Avis Harris, 43, said her daughter was an outgoing and well-behaved girl who rarely got in trouble. She was religious — regularly attending Bible study and church services, often with her grandmother.
“She was very strung out on God,” Avis Harris said in a recent interview with The Associated Press, along with her sister Joyce. “She believed that God could do anything.”
LaShuan Harris was 15 when she became involved with a 21-year-old man who would later be the father of her children. When she got pregnant at 16, her mother considered pursuing criminal charges against the man, whom she believed was taking advantage of her daughter.
“She was happy that she was pregnant. She was thrilled,” said Avis Harris. “She was doing good. I didn’t want her to be a follower. I wanted her to be a leader.”
After Treyshun was born, it took months before Harris would allow anyone else to hold her first-born. Later, her aunts took care of the boy while Harris worked as a nurse’s assistant at a convalescent home.
Five years later, a second son, Taronta, was born. Harris was now 21 and living on her own for the first time.
“There was a lot of stress on her at that time,” Avis Harris said.
And the cracks began to show.
She saw bugs in the linens at work. She’d fail to recognize her own name. She stared through you, instead of at you, and giggled and laughed to herself. She stayed awake all night and talked on the phone with no one at the other end, her mother said.
Harris had her first psychotic episode in February 2004, when she tried to jump out a window. Doctors prescribed Haldol, a drug used to treat schizophrenia, but she stopped taking it.
Eventually, she ended up at a homeless shelter, and got pregnant again.
Harris’ case is proof that mental illness can overcome even a mother’s love for her own children, Caffese said.
Avis Harris believes the system let her daughter down. Joyce Harris doesn’t know who to blame.
“My niece is sick. She needs the help that wasn’t given to her before. A tragic thing had to happen,” she said. “I love and miss my nephews. On Oct. 19, four people were lost, but one is still here. Don’t make her suffer because she’s sick. She needs help."
Lashuan Harris: Mother believes SF Bay drownings led her children to heaven
By Kim Curtis - SFGate.com
May 24, 2006
San Francisco (AP) — The day after a 23-year-old mother dropped her three young children into San Francisco Bay, she seemed almost serene, pleased that she had carried out God’s will, a psychiatrist testified Wednesday.
“She had a strong conviction in her religious beliefs and what she had done,” said Dr. Gilbert Villela who examined Lashuan Harris on Oct. 20, 2005. “She was not a murderer, she was pure and she was in the right mind.”
The testimony came during the second day of Harris’ preliminary hearing in San Francisco Superior Court to determine whether there’s enough evidence for prosecutors to take the case to trial.
Harris has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Treyshun Harris, 6, Taronta Greeley Jr., 2, and Joshoa Greeley, 16 months.
Defense lawyer Teresa Caffese said Harris is a longtime paranoid schizophrenic. Villela reached the same conclusion after spending more than a month treating her at San Francisco General Hospital.
Prosecutor Linda Allen asked Villela whether he could be sure she suffered from mental illness the day before he examined her.
He agreed psychiatry was an inexact science, but said her auditory hallucinations and religious delusions were powerful and she was unable to resist them.
“She had to carry out these commands from God,” he said. “It was her attempt to transfer her children to heaven.”
Villela also described a letter Harris wrote to her children in heaven and how she asked him to deliver it by plane.
“It was almost like I was talking to someone who believed in Santa,” he said. “It was very childlike.”
In the letter, decorated with purple crayon and blue and orange marker, Harris asked, “How is heaven holding up? I know I might not get a letter back. … Kiss my boys for me.”
Although prosecutors have not said whether they will seek the death penalty, Harris said she was looking forward to execution so she could join her children.
“She didn’t believe her children were dead,” he said. “She believed her children were in heaven, alive."
Relatives sought help before kids were drowned
Grandmother asked social service agency for partial custody
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Janine DeFao - SFGate.com
Friday, October 21, 2005
Relatives of a mentally troubled woman from Oakland who reported hearing voices before she allegedly threw her three young sons into the bay to die said Thursday they had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Alameda County social service workers to help them gain custody of the children.
Members of the family of Lashuan Ternice Harris said they had argued that the 23-year-old woman was unstable and unfit to care for her boys -- 6-year-old Trayshaun Harris, 2-year-old Taronta Greely Jr. and 16-month-old Joshua Greely.
They had given up trying by Wednesday, when Harris went to the home of a cousin and told her she was going to feed her children to the sharks.
The cousin tried frantically to prevent Harris from leaving for San Francisco with her boys, but she failed, relatives said. At 5:30 p.m., police said, Harris took the children to the end of Pier 7 along the Embarcadero, stripped them naked and threw them in the water.
Taronta's body washed up more than four hours later at Fort Mason. The bodies of the other two children have not been found, and the Coast Guard suspended its search late Thursday, about the time Harris was formally charged with three counts of murder and three counts of child assault.
Her aunt, Joyce Harris of Oakland, said Thursday that Lashuan Harris' mother had contacted Alameda County social services officials about three months ago to seek partial custody of the children because Harris had stopped taking medication for schizophrenia and had made threats regarding the boys.
"They said she was sane, that they couldn't do anything,'' Joyce Harris said.
"Maybe she didn't try as hard as she could," she said of the children's grandmother. "She said, 'I just can't get the kids.' "
At the same time, Joyce Harris added, relatives thought the threats toward the boys were "just talk. But we were always encouraging her to get help."
A spokeswoman for the Alameda County Social Services Agency, Sylvia Soublet, would not discuss whether the family had contacted her agency about gaining custody.
But Soublet did say Lashuan Harris was a client.
"This family is receiving support from our agency,'' Soublet said. "Financial support, other kinds of sustainable support -- there are a lot of areas where families have issues.''
Mental illness alone would not be grounds for the agency to take children from a mother, Soublet said.
"Certainly if the grandmother were concerned, there would be other options to seek custody," she said.
While she would not say anything about any contacts the grandmother might have made with the agency about custody, she concluded: "We have not done an investigation in regard to these children."
Family members said Lashuan Harris began acting strangely about two years ago -- becoming hysterical and wandering out at night -- and was taken by ambulance to John George Psychiatric Pavilion, a county-run mental health center in San Leandro. They said she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Earlier this year, she went to live with her sister in Florida, where she said she started hearing voices in July. She committed herself to a hospital and stayed there two days, then came back to Oakland to live with her mother.
Harris told her family that she had been cured, and she stopped taking an anti-schizophrenia drug called Haldol.
"She needed that medicine," said her sister, Telicia Harris. "The doctors said if she didn't take it, things would get worse. When she was with us, in the family, we made sure she took it. But when she was by herself, we didn't know what she was doing."
Wednesday was the birthday of Lashuan Harris' grandmother, who died in November. The two had been close, and relatives said the anniversary may have made Harris upset.
That morning, family members said, Harris showed up at a cousin's home in West Oakland, talking about finding the nearest beach in San Francisco and feeding her children to sharks.
"That was something that came up out of the blue," said Avery Garrett, Harris' uncle.
The cousin called other family members in a vain effort to keep Harris from leaving. No one in the family called police, relatives said.
When San Francisco officers arrived at Pier 7 to try to rescue Harris' children from the water, they found her standing by the railing, hair disheveled, wearing a T-shirt that read, "Focus on Me," authorities said.
Family members said Lashuan Harris, the second youngest of four children, was born in Mississippi and moved to Oakland when she was young.
She attended Fremont High School but dropped out after becoming pregnant with Trayshaun. Later, she became a certified nursing assistant at a San Leandro nursing home but stopped working two years ago when she was having problems with her sons' father, Taronta Greely, said Harris' aunt DiAnna Harris.
In October 2003, as part of a domestic violence case against Greely, now 29, Harris sought custody of their two sons at the time.
"I have been a very caring and responsible parent," she wrote in a letter to a judge. "I feed, dress and wash our children daily with very little assistance from (Greely)."
Later, the two reconciled and had another son, Joshua. Police described Greely on Wednesday as distraught about what had happened to the boys.
After her return this summer from Florida, Harris stayed briefly with her mother, then with another aunt in East Oakland. After a falling-out there, about two months ago, she and the boys moved into the Salvation Army's Garden Street shelter in the Fruitvale neighborhood.
"By all appearances, she seemed to be a model person to have in our program," Salvation Army spokeswoman Kelly Gabel said. She described Harris as quiet and polite and said she kept herself and her children clean and well-fed.
A caseworker was helping her find transitional housing. Harris had been asked to put $400 in a savings account and had already saved $350, Gabel said.
Relatives, who continued to see Harris frequently while she spent nights at the shelters, said she would sometimes talk to herself, laugh at nothing, pace or just stare blankly.
But Gabel said no one at the shelter saw such behavior.
"That's what makes this even more shocking and terrible. There were no outward signs. There was nothing alarming about her demeanor," she said.
At the shelter, Harris and her sons slept in a small, bare room with five twin beds. On Thursday, the beds remained unmade, and toddler clothes littered the floor. A children's Bible sat on one bed next to a diaper. A toy punching bag hung from another bed frame with child-size boxing gloves nearby. A worn bag decorated with a teddy bear and stuffed with papers sat on a third bed.
Gabel described shelter workers as shattered.
"It's traumatic. It's crushing," she said. "These are babies, and they're gone."
At the nearby Manzanita Elementary School, where Trayshaun had started first grade in August, teachers and grief counselors were preparing to break the news to his schoolmates.
"Everybody is in a state of shock," principal Marsha Saks said. "Knowing it happened to one of our children is a blow."
Trayshaun's teacher, Geraldine Ferri, described him as a quiet, serious child who was a good student and was well liked by the other children.
"He was always right on task, trying to do his best all the time," she said.
Some family members said Harris had been a good and protective mother, disliking even to leave the boys with baby sitters.
"Even when she was out, she would worry about her kids," said Brandy Ellis, a cousin. "She wouldn't think of giving up her kids."
"If she was in the right state of mind, she would have never done anything like this," she said. "This is not the Lashuan Harris we know."
Family: Mom who allegedly killed kids schizophrenic
Associated Press
October 21, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The woman charged with tossing her three sons into San Francisco Bay has been battling schizophrenia and once said she was going to feed the boys to the sharks, family members said.
Lashuan Harris, 23, was charged with three counts of murder Thursday while anguished relatives kept vigil and rescuers combed the chilly water for the bodies of two of the young victims.
Harris was being held in a hospital jail ward and was scheduled to be arraigned Friday.
Family members said Harris, who had been was hospitalized twice this year and had received outpatient psychiatric treatment, had made threats before. An aunt told the San Francisco Chronicle the threats had prompted the woman's mother to contact authorities, but others said they didn't think Harris would actually kill her children.
"She told my mama she was going to feed them to the sharks," said Britney Fitzpatrick, Harris' 16-year-old half sister. "No one thought it was that serious."
According to a police report, the 23-year-old Harris was heeding voices in her head when she went to San Francisco and dropped her children off a pier into the chilly water Wednesday night.
The former nurse's assistant had been living with her boys in a Salvation Army homeless shelter since September.
The body of Harris' middle child, Taronta Greeley, 2, was recovered late Wednesday near the St. Francis Yacht Club, about two miles from Pier 7. The other two boys — Treyshun Harris, 6 and Joshoa Greeley, 16 months — remained missing, but were presumed dead after so many hours in water with a swift current and temperatures in the low 50s.
The U.S. Coast Guard called off its search Thursday afternoon, but the San Francisco police and fire departments continued to scour the bay until after dark.
Demarcus Harris, Lashuan Harris' cousin, said the last time he saw her was Tuesday at his sister's house in Oakland and the boys were with her.
When his cousin left, she said goodbye and "I'm going to miss y'all." He said neither he nor his sister suspected what she would do the next day. "We all thought she was just going home," he said.
Harris was hospitalized in January at the John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro and her mother was briefly granted custody of the boys, according to her older sister, Telicia Harris, 26.
Alameda County social service workers concluded after the first hospital stay that Lashuan was fit to care for her sons, Telicia Harris said.
Lashuan Harris' aunt, Joyce Harris, told the Chronicle for Friday's editions that Lashuan's mother had contacted social services officials about three months ago to seek partial custody of the children. She made the request because Harris had stopped taking medication for schizophrenia and had made threats regarding the boys, the paper reported.
"They said she was sane, that they couldn't do anything," Joyce Harris told the newspaper.
Sylvia Soublet, a spokeswoman for the Alameda County Social Services Agency, told the Chronicle she could not discuss whether the family had contacted her agency about gaining custody.
Harris told investigators she had taken the anti-psychotic drug Haldol to control her schizophrenia but stopped when she got her symptoms under control over the summer, according to the police report.
But she said the voices returned Tuesday night and were still with her when she put her children into the water, according to the report.
Asked why she didn't seek help from a doctor on Wednesday, Harris said she didn't know but thought the clinics would be closed.
"Lashuan is very protective of the children and I think one of the reasons Lashuan stopped taking her medication was for fear of losing her three children," an uncle, Avery Garrett, told NBC's Today show Friday.
San Francisco mom pleads innocent to murder
Woman seen tossing 3 kids into bay described as mentally ill by family
Associated Press
October 21, 2005
The woman seen dropping her young sons into San Francisco Bay pleaded innocent Friday to three counts of murder.
Lashuan Harris, described as mentally ill by family members, kept her head down and held her public defender’s hand through most of the brief court hearing. She quietly answered “yes” when the San Francisco Superior Court judge asked if she were willing to waive her right to a speedy preliminary hearing.
Harris, 23, faces three counts of murder with special circumstances, making her eligible for the death penalty.
Her lawyer, Teresa Caffese, refused to address questions about Harris’ mental state, saying only her client was under suicide watch. She’s being held without bail.
“It’s very, very difficult,” Caffese said. “This can’t be captured in words right now.”
Authorities said Harris, a former nurse’s assistant who was living in a homeless shelter, was seen putting her three boys in the bay Wednesday.
One body found
The body of Harris’ middle son, Taronta Greeley, 2, was recovered late Wednesday about two miles from Pier 7. The other two — Treyshun Harris, 6 and Joshoa Greeley, 16 months — remained missing but were presumed dead after so many hours in the water.
The U.S. Coast Guard called off its search Thursday afternoon, but the San Francisco police and fire departments continue to scour the bay for the two bodies.
Harris’ next court hearing was scheduled for Oct. 28.
Harris told investigators she had taken the anti-psychotic drug Haldol to control schizophrenia but stopped when she got her symptoms under control over the summer, according to a police report. But she said the voices returned Tuesday night and were still with her when she put her children into the water, according to the report.
Family member said Harris had made threats before. An aunt told the San Francisco Chronicle the threats had prompted the woman’s mother to contact authorities, but others said they didn’t think Harris would actually kill her children.
“She told my mama she was going to feed them to the sharks,” said Britney Fitzpatrick, Harris’ 16-year-old half sister. “No one thought it was that serious.”
Demarcus Harris, Lashuan Harris’ cousin, said the last time he saw her was Tuesday at his sister’s house in Oakland and the boys were with her.
When his cousin left, she said goodbye and “I’m going to miss y’all.” He said neither he nor his sister suspected what she would do the next day. “We all thought she was just going home,” he said.
Harris was hospitalized in January at the John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro and her mother was briefly granted custody of the boys, according to her older sister, Telicia Harris, 26.
Deemed fit as a mother
Alameda County social service workers concluded after the first hospital stay that Lashuan was fit to care for her sons, Telicia Harris said.
Lashuan Harris’ aunt, Joyce Harris, told the Chronicle for Friday’s editions that Lashuan’s mother had contacted social services officials about three months ago to seek partial custody of the children. She made the request because Harris had stopped taking medication and had made threats regarding the boys, the paper reported.
“They said she was sane, that they couldn’t do anything,” Joyce Harris told the newspaper.
Sylvia Soublet, a spokeswoman for the Alameda County Social Services Agency, told the Chronicle she could not discuss whether the family had contacted her agency about gaining custody.
“Lashuan is very protective of the children and I think one of the reasons Lashuan stopped taking her medication was for fear of losing her three children,” an uncle, Avery Garrett, told NBC’s “Today” show Friday.
