COMPTON—Too bad it’s not just a bad dream.
A top official in the District Attorney’s Office last week called the case of John Wesley Ewell — a repeat felony offender permitted to remain free on bail after a recent series of arrests and accused of subsequently murdering four people — a “prosecutor’s nightmare,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
That sounds about right. We imagine that Mayor Eric J. Perrodin, the deputy district attorney assigned to prosecute the latter two of Ewell’s three felony arrests involving separate thefts from three different The Home Depot stores, hasn’t been sleeping all that well lately.
Besides the increasing amount of trouble that’s brewing in Compton, Perrodin has been taking a pummeling from various media outlets, including KFI AM 640 talk radio and KTLA Channel 5, in addition to the Times, for what’s being considered as the Compton mayor’s leniency in prosecuting 53-year-old Ewell on his final two felony theft and commercial burglary charges from earlier this year. The mayor has thus far refused to comment or answer any questions regarding the blunder.
The Times reported Dec. 4 that Assistant District Attorney Jacquelyn Lacey said Ewell’s bail should have been set at more than $100,000 each of the three times he was arrested for stealing from Home Depot. That amount is in part based on Ewell’s prior robbery and forgery convictions.
Instead, despite Ewell’s blatant and repeated disregard for the law and the District Attoerney’s Office’s recommendation that bail be set at more than $100,000, Ewell’s bail was set at $20,000 for each of the three theft cases, which technically constituted his fourth, fifth and sixth strikes.
Court records show that on two occasions Perrodin “said during court hearings that he had no objection to Ewell’s remaining out of custody,” according to the Times.
Free on bail, Ewell allegedly embarked upon a crazed slaying spree that some media outlets have characterized as serial killing, leaving four people dead over the course of just more than a month’s time in September and October. Three of the four victims were murdered following the second time Perrodin chose to not request that Ewell be remanded into custody.
How does a former-police-officer-turned-prosecutor who appears to have dedicated his life to putting so-called “bad guys” behind bars (something that Perrodin has publicly stated on more than one occasion he “loves” to do) fail to become alarmed or suspicious regarding Ewell’s patterned offenses in his retreat back into a life of crime? If nothing else, his having committed the exact same crime two additional times (that we know of) within a rather short time span of being arrested and charged for the first should have set off sirens.
How could Perrodin have missed this?
Some in the community are postulating — thus far based more on gossip than on any evidence — that Perrodin somehow knows Ewell and was purposefully lenient with him. After all, even a judge acknowledged that Ewell was getting a break thanks to Perrodin and that it if it were up to the judge, Ewell would have been locked up “on the spot.” And that was during the first Home Depot case to which Perrodin was assigned.
Three-strikes sensationalization?
Many, especially the victims’ loved ones, are outraged after discovering that, should Ewell be convicted of killing all four people, the murders technically represent Ewell’s seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th strikes under California’s embattled three-strikes law.
According to the 1994 sentence-enhancement law, Ewell should have been placed behind bars for 25 years to life beginning in 1994, when he was convicted of his third strike after attempting to deposit a $2,800 forged check into his bank account. Prosecutors offered Ewell a deal, scrapping pursuit of a third-strike conviction under the then-new law and agreeing to a reduced sentence of seven years in exchange for a guilty plea.
It has since been more or less generally accepted that the three-strikes law is flawed in that someone with two strikes on his or her record could wind up in prison for life (with taxpayers footing the bill) over a minor felony offense such as loitering or vandalism.
County prosecutors were following an office policy instated by District Attorney Steve Cooley the last few times around when they on three occasions chose not to seek the sentencing enhancement while prosecuting Ewell. The county only pursues a third-strike conviction when the felony offense is considered major or violent.
But even those who aren’t part of the mostly right-wing group of three-strikes thumpers are up in arms regarding Ewell’s case, arguing that had just one of his last four crimes been prosecuted as his third strike, Ewell’s four alleged victims would still be alive today.
Then there’s FishbowlLA, which believes that all the fuss is sensationalized.
The media-focused Mediabistro.com blog features a Dec. 1 post describing the amount of time Ewell previously spent in prison for his first and second strikes, and his 32-month sentence for the first Home Depot incident that he had yet to begin serving, as already excessive for what it deems his “petty” crimes.
The site even takes it a step further, accusing the Times of “engineering” its Dec. 1 front-page story in order to re-spark the long contentious three-strikes debate, which in recent years has been eclipsed by, among others, the debate on gay marriage.
We agree with FishbowlLA when it postulates that Ewell’s murder spree was a result of his having lost his mind. But we also believe that there needs to be some accountability in terms of prosecutors, namely Perrodin, failing to see or ignoring the red flags sprouted by Ewell’s recent criminal behavior. Three, after all, is considered a pattern, and there was nothing to suggest Ewell planned to cease breaking that pattern.
Back to the idea that Ewell went crazy — we’re willing to bet that Ewell suffered some type of mental breakdown, or perhaps even has dealt with instances of psychological instability throughout his life, and this catalyzed his taking the giant leap from a life of mostly nonviolent thievery to a spree of murders that increasingly escalated in terms of brutality.
His first alleged victim was Hanna Morcos, an 80-year-old man whom authorities say was attacked, bound and gagged. But, different from the other three victims, Morcos was not strangled. Instead, his death was ruled to have been caused by a heart attack that was likely triggered by the attack. It is still being ruled a homicide.
The body of Ewell’s second alleged victim, Denice Roberts, 53, was found bound and gagged. She had been strangled to death.
Ewell was arrested in late October a day after murdering his final two alleged victims. Leamon Turnage, 69, and his wife, Robyn, 57, were discovered dead in their ransacked Hawthorne home. They had been bound, gagged, beaten and eventually strangled to death. The carnage at the scene was so horrific that even the most seasoned law enforcement officials were taken aback, the Associated Press and CBS News reported.
“It was pretty gruesome,” Lt. Gary Tobatani of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department told the AP and CBS. “It takes a lot to cause veteran police officers to say ‘wow, this is completely out of the ordinary and over the top.’”
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