A young mother who claimed she tossed her three young sons to their deaths in San Francisco Bay to send them to heaven was declared criminally insane Wednesday by a judge, sparing her a possible life sentence.

The rare ruling came a day after jurors found Lashuan Harris, 24, guilty of second-degree murder in the drownings of her three boys on Oct. 19, 2005.

Defense lawyers argued that Harris was schizophrenic and borderline mentally retarded and that she was convinced she was acting on orders from God when she plunged 6-year-old Trayshawn Harris, 2-year-old Taronta Greely Jr. and 16-month-old Joshua Greely into the bay.

Judge Ksenia Tsenin agreed with the defense, saying Harris "was incapable of knowing or understanding the quality of her acts."

Harris will be sent to a mental hospital indefinitely instead of state prison. She can be released if doctors find her legally sane.

The decision nullifies the jury's guilty verdicts on three counts each of second-degree murder and assault of a child causing death. She would have faced at least 25 years in prison for those crimes.

Harris waived her right to continue the sanity phase of the trial in front of the jury and instead chose to have her case argued to Tsenin. A majority of insanity defenses fail because the defendant has to prove they didn't know what they were doing was wrong.

In her videotaped confession, Harris described how she struggled with two of her boys as she stripped them and plunged them from Pier 7 in an area where tourists stroll along the waterfront. Her youngest boy laughed, thinking it was a game.

One of the bodies was recovered, but the others were never found.

Harris was placed in a psychiatric hospital six times between February 2004 and August 2005 and her mother warned a social worker that she would hurt her children the day they died. But the social worker didn't believe her, defense lawyer Teresa Caffese said.

San Francisco Police Officer Michael White, among the first on the scene, testified during the trial that Harris appeared "very calm" as she walked away from the pier with a stroller filled with her children's clothes.

"It seemed like nothing was bothering her," White said. "She was in a different place."

The jury deliberated more than nine days before reaching all verdicts.

One juror, Anjal Pong, said after Tuesday's verdict that the jury quickly decided that Harris was not guilty of first-degree murder, but were equally split between convicting her of second-degree murder or manslaughter.

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris said in a statement that the case "was tragic for all involved".

Mother in murder trial had been in the hospital

She did not receive proper treatment, defender says

Jaxon Van Derbeken - SFGate.com

November 27, 2006

An Oakland mother accused of hurling her three young sons into San Francisco Bay had been hospitalized six times in the 20 months leading up to their deaths but never received proper treatment, her attorney said on the first day of the trial Monday.

Lashuan Harris, 24, faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment without parole if convicted of first-degree murder in the Oct. 19, 2005 slayings of Trayshawn Harris, 6; Taronta Greely Jr., 2; and 16-month-old Joshua Greely. The children were thrown over the railing on San Francisco's Pier 7. Only the body of Taronta was recovered.

The eight-man, four-woman jury first must determine whether Harris is guilty of murder and a separate charge of assault on a child under 8 causing death. If Harris is found guilty, a second phase of the trial would determine whether she was legally sane or insane at the time of the deaths.

In court Monday, Harris was calm, sometimes smiling while her family periodically wept.

She had told police hours after the incident that she threw her children into the bay because God had ordered her to send the children to heaven and that she was caught in the midst of "spiritual warfare."

Assistant District Attorney Linda Allen, acknowledging that the jury would have sympathy for a mentally troubled, single mother, said in her opening statement that Harris nonetheless knew what she was doing when she stripped her children of their clothes and tossed them into the water.

"It was willful, deliberate and premeditated -- she thought about what to do," Allen said. "She deliberated over this decision, even though she was mentally ill."

Harris' attorney, chief deputy public defender Teresa Caffese, showed family photos of Harris with her sons and outlined Harris' struggle with mental illness.

She said that Harris grew up as a shy child in Oakland after her family came moved from Mississippi. At 15, she became pregnant by a 21-year-old man. Her mother wanted to press charges for rape, but Harris welcomed the child and her family felt she had never been so happy, Caffese said.

She described her client, who had worked as a certified nursing assistant, as a devout woman and a good mother, who kept her children well-clothed and fed and who "didn't have a mean bone in her body."

But Harris struggled with "disease lurking within her," Caffese said. That illness surfaced in 2002, when family members saw her arguing with people who were not there, exhibiting unprompted outbursts of laughter and acting out a second personality.

After suffering alleged domestic abuse at the hand of the children's father in 2003 -- a charge he denies -- Harris was first hospitalized in Feb. 19, 2004, while pregnant with her third son. She talked about "giving her babies to Jesus," Caffese said. She was released without ongoing mental care, Caffese said, and soon started to smell dead bodies and hear voices.

Four days later, she was sent back to the hospital for paranoia and talking about "spiritual warfare," and was released the next day. She went home with her mother, but was back in the hospital the following month after threatening to jump out of a window, her attorney said, and was released seven days later, again without ongoing treatment.

Harris was hospitalized again that month after wandering around one night, trying to jump out of moving cars and speaking in sentence fragments. She was released a week later with a referral to an outpatient clinic in Oakland, Caffese said. In the spring of 2005, Harris went to stay with her sister in Jacksonville, Fla., but was soon hospitalized, talking about spiritual warfare and repeating the phrase "reverse the curse."

Her mother brought her back to Oakland, where she was hospitalized after threatening suicide. She was released in July 2005, Caffese said, "without any ongoing mental health treatment."

Harris started living in a Salvation Army shelter but her symptoms returned. The night before her children died, she heard voices telling her to sacrifice them, the attorney said.

Yashpal Singh testified Monday that he was strolling with his two children near the waterfront on the day of the killings and saw Harris appearing to chase her oldest son around the pier.

"He was shouting, 'No Mommy, no Mommy,' " Singh said. "She was chasing him and taking the clothes off. I assumed she was changing him. We didn't realize what was going to happen."

She then threw the first boy into the water, Singh testified. By the time police arrived, Harris had loaded the children's clothing into a stroller and was pushing it away. When an officer asked about the children, Harris replied that they were OK, and "they are with their father."

Woman who threw three kids in SF bay on trial for murder

By Kim Curtis - SFGate.com

November 12, 2006

San Francisco (AP) — LaShuan Harris and her three children took a train from Oakland into San Francisco on Oct. 19, 2005. She bought the little boys hot dogs and they walked along Fisherman’s Wharf.

It was an unremarkable scene among the hordes who flock daily to the city’s tourist hub. Then the day turned sinister.

Harris undressed the three boys, ages 6, 2 and 16 months, and dropped them one at a time over the low railing and into chilly San Francisco Bay.

She knew they couldn’t swim and thought she was sending them to heaven. God had commanded her to sacrifice her three boys, her most precious possessions, Harris later told psychiatrists. Passersby said she seemed dazed, disoriented.

Police arrested the 23-year-old mother as she pushed an empty stroller away from Pier 7.

Harris was charged with three counts of murder and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her case is scheduled to go to trial this week; if convicted, she faces life in prison.

Now 24, Harris remains locked up in the psychiatric section of the San Francisco County Jail. Public defender Teresa Caffese calls her the rare client who “doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”

Her family says Harris is mentally ill and needs to be treated in a mental institution, rather than incarcerated in a prison. But prosecutor Linda Allen says that’s a decision for a jury to make.

Legal experts say proving legal insanity is always a tall order.

“The burden of proof is on her,” said Pete Kossoris, a former Ventura County prosecutor. “She has to show that by reason of some mental defect or disease, she didn’t know the nature of what she was doing or that it was wrong.”

During pretrial hearings, Harris sat in court smiling slightly, eyes downcast. She laughed and talked to herself; she sometimes rocked back and forth. At least three mental health professionals have diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic. She’s also borderline mentally retarded with an IQ of 69, according to her lawyer.

Caffese contends Harris never intended to murder her children.

“She was trapped inside an overwhelming delusion, one that kept telling her to take her kids and ‘put them in the water’ to send them to Jesus,” Caffese said in a recent court filing. “And that is what she believes she did.”

She said Harris believes her children are in heaven — her youngest is now potty-trained, her eldest in school. She sends God postcards written in crayon.

The case is a tragedy, concedes Allen, the prosecutor, but Harris must nonetheless be punished for her crime.

“She walked around the pier and cried because she loved her children, showing that she understood she had killed them and that they were gone,” Allen said in court documents. “Even if defendant thought she was sending her children to heaven, she was doing so by killing them.”

What brought Harris — a poor, young black woman existing on the margins of society — to the pier on Oct. 19, 2005, is itself a tragedy.

Avis Harris, 43, said her daughter was an outgoing and well-behaved girl who rarely got in trouble. She was religious — regularly attending Bible study and church services, often with her grandmother.

“She was very strung out on God,” Avis Harris said in a recent interview with The Associated Press, along with her sister Joyce. “She believed that God could do anything.”

LaShuan Harris was 15 when she became involved with a 21-year-old man who would later be the father of her children. When she got pregnant at 16, her mother considered pursuing criminal charges against the man, whom she believed was taking advantage of her daughter.

“She was happy that she was pregnant. She was thrilled,” said Avis Harris. “She was doing good. I didn’t want her to be a follower. I wanted her to be a leader.”

After Treyshun was born, it took months before Harris would allow anyone else to hold her first-born. Later, her aunts took care of the boy while Harris worked as a nurse’s assistant at a convalescent home.

Five years later, a second son, Taronta, was born. Harris was now 21 and living on her own for the first time.

“There was a lot of stress on her at that time,” Avis Harris said.

And the cracks began to show.

She saw bugs in the linens at work. She’d fail to recognize her own name. She stared through you, instead of at you, and giggled and laughed to herself. She stayed awake all night and talked on the phone with no one at the other end, her mother said.

Harris had her first psychotic episode in February 2004, when she tried to jump out a window. Doctors prescribed Haldol, a drug used to treat schizophrenia, but she stopped taking it.

Eventually, she ended up at a homeless shelter, and got pregnant again.

Harris’ case is proof that mental illness can overcome even a mother’s love for her own children, Caffese said.

Avis Harris believes the system let her daughter down. Joyce Harris doesn’t know who to blame.

“My niece is sick. She needs the help that wasn’t given to her before. A tragic thing had to happen,” she said. “I love and miss my nephews. On Oct. 19, four people were lost, but one is still here. Don’t make her suffer because she’s sick. She needs help."

Lashuan Harris: Mother believes SF Bay drownings led her children to heaven

By Kim Curtis - SFGate.com

May 24, 2006

San Francisco (AP) — The day after a 23-year-old mother dropped her three young children into San Francisco Bay, she seemed almost serene, pleased that she had carried out God’s will, a psychiatrist testified Wednesday.

“She had a strong conviction in her religious beliefs and what she had done,” said Dr. Gilbert Villela who examined Lashuan Harris on Oct. 20, 2005. “She was not a murderer, she was pure and she was in the right mind.”

The testimony came during the second day of Harris’ preliminary hearing in San Francisco Superior Court to determine whether there’s enough evidence for prosecutors to take the case to trial.

Harris has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Treyshun Harris, 6, Taronta Greeley Jr., 2, and Joshoa Greeley, 16 months.

Defense lawyer Teresa Caffese said Harris is a longtime paranoid schizophrenic. Villela reached the same conclusion after spending more than a month treating her at San Francisco General Hospital.

Prosecutor Linda Allen asked Villela whether he could be sure she suffered from mental illness the day before he examined her.

He agreed psychiatry was an inexact science, but said her auditory hallucinations and religious delusions were powerful and she was unable to resist them.

“She had to carry out these commands from God,” he said. “It was her attempt to transfer her children to heaven.”

Villela also described a letter Harris wrote to her children in heaven and how she asked him to deliver it by plane.

“It was almost like I was talking to someone who believed in Santa,” he said. “It was very childlike.”

In the letter, decorated with purple crayon and blue and orange marker, Harris asked, “How is heaven holding up? I know I might not get a letter back. … Kiss my boys for me.”

Although prosecutors have not said whether they will seek the death penalty, Harris said she was looking forward to execution so she could join her children.

“She didn’t believe her children were dead,” he said. “She believed her children were in heaven, alive."