The story of paranoid schizophrenic Ofiu Edwards Foto, detailed Sunday by The Bee's Andy Furillo, exposes dangerous loopholes in the state's mental health and criminal justice systems.
Foto has a 20-year history of extreme violence and several criminal convictions, yet the Sacramento man was housed in an unlocked group home in Sacramento's Oak Park, where in September, police say, he beat an elderly woman to death and severely injured the woman's husband.
At various times, Foto violently assaulted people while he was in a psychotic state. After each attack, records show, he was shunted from jail to state hospitals, then into community mental health facilities, some locked and some unlocked. Then he would assault someone else and the cycle would start all over.
In his last encounter with the criminal justice system before being charged with murder, Sacramento prosecutors allowed Foto to plead no contest to felony assault in the 2006 beating of a 76-year-old woman in a Florin-area group home for the mentally ill. Foto had offered to plead not guilty by reason of insanity in that case, but prosecutors rejected that offer and the judge placed him on probation instead.
"Looking at all the alternatives available, probation with a lengthy supervision time to ensure compliance with his mental health directives appeared to be the best alternative," Assistant District Attorney Albert Locher told The Bee.
According to state mental health officials, had Foto been found not guilty by reason of insanity, he would have been confined to a state mental hospital. Treatment there would have been mandatory. If he had been released, he would have been subject to many more restrictions and closer monitoring than he received as a probationer. Had he stopped taking his medications or showed signs of delusion, he could have been recommitted.
Locher strongly disputes that. He thinks Foto, who was confined in locked mental health facilities for two years after his no-contest plea, would have spent even less time at a state hospital. When placed on probation, Foto was first locked up at the Sacramento Mental Health Treatment Center on Stockton Boulevard. From there he was sent to a locked skilled-nursing home in Modesto and then to two different unlocked group homes in Sacramento. While at one of them, Sandy's Guest House in Oak Park, he allegedly beat 65-year-old Pausta Sibarani to death and nearly killed her husband, Tumber Purba, 69.
The couple's son understandably wants to know why Foto was placed in the group home where his parents worked. Did the facility's owner know about his violent past? Who made the decision? Was there a simple mistake in judgment here, or was this gross incompetence? Are the state's mental health laws dangerously flawed, as critics assert?
Both the couple's son and the public deserve answers to those questions. This case cries out for a closer examination by the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office, the public guardian's office and mental health officials at both the state and local level.
Such an examination can and should answer a bigger question: What more can and should be done to protect the public from mentally ill people who are truly dangerous?
About Comments
Reader comments on Sacbee.com are the opinions of the writer, not The Sacramento Bee. If you see an objectionable comment, click the "report abuse" button below it. We will delete comments containing inappropriate links, obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks. Flagrant or repeat violators will be banned. See more about comments here.