On October 19, 2005, LaShuan Harris, twenty-three, took her three boys on the train from Oakland into San Francisco. She bought them hot dogs, and they walked along Fisherman's Wharf. At Pier 7, where tourists stroll along the waterfront, she undressed the boys and dropped them one at a time over the low railing into the cold water of the bay. She knew they could not swim. In her videotaped confession she described struggling with two of them as she stripped them; the youngest laughed, thinking it was a game. Passersby said she seemed dazed. Police arrested her as she pushed an empty stroller away from the pier.
The boys were Trayshawn Harris, six, Taronta Greely Jr., two, and Joshua Greely, sixteen months; court papers and the press spell their names in several ways. One body was recovered. The other two were never found.
She believed she had done what God asked of her. The day after, a psychiatrist who examined her found her almost serene, and she later told doctors that God had commanded her to sacrifice her three boys, her most precious possessions, and that they were growing up in heaven. She had paranoid schizophrenia. Between February 2004 and August 2005 she had been hospitalized for mental illness six times. On the day the boys died her mother warned a social worker that she would hurt them; according to the defense, the social worker did not believe it because Harris was such a good mother.
She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. In June 2006 the San Francisco district attorney's office, under Kamala Harris, decided not to seek the death penalty. "This woman committed a homicide, there's no question there," a spokeswoman said. "The question here is whether she spends her life in prison or in a hospital." In pretrial hearings she sat smiling slightly with her eyes lowered, laughing and talking to herself and rocking back and forth. Her public defender, Teresa Caffese, called her the rare client who did not have a mean bone in her body.
California tries sanity separately from guilt, and the jurors were not allowed to weigh her mental state in the first phase. On January 16, 2007, they found her guilty of three counts of second-degree murder and three of assault on a child causing death, which would have meant at least twenty-five years in prison. The next day Superior Court Judge Ksenia Tsenin found that Harris had been "incapable of knowing or understanding the quality of her acts" and ruled her legally insane, voiding the verdicts. The prosecutor, Linda Allen, offered no evidence against the finding, and the district attorney did not oppose commitment.
She was sent to a state mental hospital for an indefinite term, to be released only if doctors ever find her legally sane. "Yesterday there was no justice," Caffese said after the ruling. "Yesterday it was about the law. Today there was justice." A juror, Chuck O'Grady, said the panel wanted her to get the help she needed. Harris herself, her lawyer said, was relieved, and sad only to have been convicted, because she did not believe she had killed her sons. She thought she could join them in heaven.