LaShuan Harris drowned her three sons in San Francisco Bay on October 19, 2005. This is one act on one day, and the archive flags it as a single incident rather than a series.
She was born in 1982 and had a documented history of severe mental illness. She had been prescribed Haldol for schizophrenia and had stopped taking it. She took the children to the end of Pier 7 at the Port of San Francisco, undressed them, and dropped them one after another into the water, knowing they could not swim. Trayshawn Harris was six, Taronta Greely Jr. was two, and Joshua Greely was sixteen months. Only Taronta’s body was recovered. She said she believed she was sending them to heaven.
Two sets of authorities had been told something was wrong. Her own mother had contacted them about threats she had made. And Alameda County social workers concluded, after a hospital stay in January 2006, that she was fit to care for the boys.
A jury convicted her on January 16, 2007 of three counts of second-degree murder and three counts of assault of a child causing death. The next day Judge Ksenia Tsenin declared her criminally insane, and that ruling voided the jury’s verdicts entirely. The judge found she was incapable of knowing or understanding the quality of her acts. The district attorney did not oppose the commitment and the prosecution offered no evidence against it.
So there is no standing conviction. She was committed to a state hospital indefinitely rather than sentenced, and may be released if doctors find her legally sane. She is schizophrenic and was found to be borderline intellectually disabled. A death sentence had been available on a multiple-murder special circumstance and was never pursued.