April 2001

Two Cents' Worth

by Mark A. Panitch, Bar News Editor

National Crime Victim Awareness Week is April 22-28. The first week of May is National Law Week. This is the first of two columns on crime victims and the law. This month: "Being a Crime Victim"; next month: "Crime Victims and the Law."

The experts say write about what you know. But sometimes that's a tough assignment. What I know most intensely and most intimately is the meaning of the phrases "homicide survivor" and "crime victim." In a very real way my life is divided into two parts: everything before 10:00 a.m. on February 21, 1989, and everything since. Before that time I had one sibling, my sister Robbyn. At 10:15 a.m. she was fighting desperately for her life. By 11:00 a.m. she was dead.

Robbyn was a psychiatric social worker with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. Her job was to provide counseling and "case management" services to the hundreds of mentally ill homeless people who gravitate to the beach communities in the Santa Monica area. She was an advocate, a counselor, a one-woman social support network, and a friend to dozens of people who had few other advocates, counselors, supporters or friends.

David Scott Smith was a young man with a good past, but no future. He was an Air Force veteran with an honorable discharge and had been a security officer at Hughes Aircraft. But then he started attacking women, including his mother. When he was arrested for that assault, it was clear to mental health workers at the jail that he was schizophrenic. As part of his sentence he was ordered to participate in a community mental health program. He was started on a regimen of drugs and therapy that kept his illness in check as long as he faithfully took his medication. But there was virtually no supervision either from his probation officer or the mental health program. So, like so many seriously mentally ill people, he stopped taking his "meds" and surrendered control of his life to voices only he could hear.

He became homeless and joined the ragged, unwashed men who congregated on the bluffs overlooking the beach, self-medicating with bottles of fortified wine they passed around while listening to their own inner voices. As one of the homeless mentally ill, David Smith automatically became part of Robbyn's caseload. During the next few months she found him several places to live and tried to get him back into a community mental health program. He responded by showing up at her office unannounced and screaming at her, stalking her on the street, and threatening her for failing to provide the peace that he could find only by taking his medication.

Robbyn reported her concerns to her superiors. She asked for more security at her office, even something as simple as an intercom so she would know who was outside before opening the door. The answer was always, "We don't have the money." On the other hand, she repeatedly declined the offer of a gun from her deputy sheriff fiancé. That wasn't her.

Finally, she tried to have David Smith committed for observation. On February 18, David Smith was taken by police for a psychiatric evaluation at a UCLA hospital. The resident on duty examined him and wrote in the chart that David Scott Smith posed no danger to himself or anyone else. He received no therapy, no counseling and no medication. Within a few hours David Smith was back on the streets, angrier than ever.

We don't know what he did between Saturday night and Tuesday morning, but at about 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, David Scott Smith barged into Robbyn's office with a knife in his hand. Robbyn was on the phone with her back to the door when David Smith stabbed her in the back. Her screams brought several patients who tried to distract Smith. Instead he threatened them with the bloody knife, shouted that he was "killing the antichrist," and continued stabbing until several of Robbyn's male colleagues subdued him. He stabbed Robbyn more than 30 times.

I was at work, and my wife, Martha, was literally walking out the door for a 24-hour shift as emergency-room doctor at a rural hospital when the phone rang. Fortunately she decided to answer it. It was my father calling to tell us of Robbyn's death. Martha called me. That is how I learned that my sister had been murdered. It is the way that most "homicide survivors" learn about the death of their loved one. Naturally, we rushed to the airport and flew from Yakima to Los Angeles, where we joined family and friends gathered at my parents' home. We were all in shock, consumed with anger, and completely helpless.

As the family expert on criminal law, I tried to explain what would happen to David Smith. But in the face of the event my explanations seemed hollow and meaningless. The fact was that nothing could bring Robbyn back or reduce the horror of her death.

The next week was surreal. We discovered many things about Robbyn's life that we never imagined. More than 500 peopleattended her funeral. There were homeless people. There were police officers. There were former inmates of the Los Angeles County jail where she had once worked as a mental health professional. There were faculty from the USC School of Social Work where she received her MSW, and a delegation from Mills College in Oakland, her undergraduate college. There were dozens of social workers and union representatives, and dozens more friends and family members. We were stunned at the outpouring of good will.

Robbyn's death became the "poster event" for problems with the mental health system. Her murder was front-page news for days, and it even made national radio and TV broadcasts. We were asked by reporters to comment on the meaning of Robbyn's death. The most common question was: "Do you think something good will come from this?" People who barely knew Robbyn were turning her into a martyr for their causes.

In fact, Robbyn didn't "sacrifice" herself for anything. She didn't sacrifice herself at all. She was murdered by someone who had given all the signs of his intent, but was ignored.

On television, this is where a good-hearted clergyman says something like, "She's in a better place now." Or a well-meaning friend says, cheerfully, "Well, life goes on. She wouldn't want you to be morose. She would want you to celebrate her life." In fact, such saccharine homilies are like rubbing salt in a wound. There are times and places when words fail, and the graveside of a murder victim is one of those places in time.

(Ironically, when I returned to Yakima there were no words or cards of condolence from my friends in the defense bar, but I was treated with true kindness by prosecutors, and received a personal card from Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan. Go figure.)

In reality, the weeks after the funeral were just the beginning of the journey into a personal hell that most victims of violent assaults and virtually all homicide survivors experience. The crowd disperses and you are alone with your closest family members and a huge pile of unanswered — and unanswerable — questions, and an even larger pile of guilt.

Every person's experience is different, there are no real "stages" of grief, and anyone who tries to force your grief into a box should be ignored. The bleakness and anxiety come in waves that overwhelm and then recede, making you think things are getting better while leaving you just as vulnerable as before. But within a few weeks your boss will be asking, "Haven't you gotten over that yet?" And your co-workers will start avoiding you. Depression and grief become the core of your life. For about three years I didn't see color. My world was dominated by shades of grey.

A murder is like a hole in the social fabric. At first the hole has discrete edges, but soon the edges start to fray and tears radiate out in every direction. First there is only the victim, but soon others are terribly affected by the death. Marriages that have lasted through decades break up as the partners trade guilt and recrimination over the death of a child — even an adult child. Teenage siblings become more likely to commit suicide. Long-lasting friendships shred because even the best of friends cannot deal with your pervasive depression and almost obsessive need to talk about the lost loved one. Grief depresses immune systems, and the terrible grief left by murder does even more so. Healthy people become ill, and sick people die. Less than three years after Robbyn was murdered, my mother died of cancer, only diagnosed after Robbyn's death. A friend of mine, a former police officer, says that a killer gets the rest of the family on the installment plan.

Two years after the murder, David Smith came to trial. Although I had tried more than 100 felony cases to verdict, I was seeing the trial with new eyes. The players were the prosecutor, the defendant and the defense attorney. Although her death was the reason we were all there, Robbyn was hardly mentioned. She was "the deceased" or "the victim." For the prosecutor, her entire life was compressed into its last 10 minutes.

But for the defense her life was virtually irrelevant and her death was her own fault. Unbelievably, David Smith's attorney asserted that he had killed in self-defense. He argued that in David Smith's hallucinatory state he reasonably believed that Robbyn posed a real threat to him, so he had a right to kill her. Even more amazingly, the judge allowed the defense. My family I and sat in stunned horror as reality was turned on its head. The murderer was portrayed as the victim, while the victim was accused of causing her own death by somehow causing David Smith's murderous hallucinations.

After months of trial and less than two days of deliberations, the jury returned its verdict — guilty of first-degree murder. Although, as in Washington, we were allowed to address the court before sentencing, the sentence was really foregone. Afterward, the judge advised us to go home and "get over it." Like most clichés, that's easier said than done.

Rather than being the end of grief, a trial and conviction is really just the start. It signals "closure" only in the sense that the killer's fate is determined. Only then do many victims and survivors start trying to cope.

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