Mitrice Richardson Press Conference Provides More Questions than Answers

• Sheriff Tries to Shift Onus to Restaurant and LASD Citizen’s Arrest Policies •

BY ANNE SOBLE

TENSE MOMENTS—Sheriff Lee Baca became visibly irritated by media efforts to obtain more information about the skeletal find that was announced to be the remains of Mitrice Richardson on Thursday. County Coroner spokesperson Ed Winter also sidestepped many of the media questions, stating that “the investigation is still in progress.”          MSN/Charles Croft

At a press conference Thursday at Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department headquarters downtown, Sheriff Lee Baca announced what had been conjectured since Monday that skeletal remains found in dense chaparral in the Malibu area mountains are those of Mitrice Richardson, the Cal State Fullerton honors graduate who had been missing since Sept. 17, 2009.
The final determination by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office that it was the 24-year-old Los Angeles woman was the result of daylong analysis by a pathologist, forensic anthropologist and an odontologist who used dental records and x-rays provided by Richardson’s mother, Latice Sutton, for identification.
Baca, flanked by a phalanx of nearly every LASD officer who works on the Richardson case, used the word “chagrin” to describe the reaction of the LASD and others to the findings, yet any sense of humiliation or failure connoted in the word was not evident as the county’s top lawman testily affirmed that his people had done everything properly and professionally.
At the press conference, the ongoing confusion about the location of the skeletal find and its distance from the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station from which Richardson was released at 12:30 a.m. the day she disappeared, as well as from the Monte Nido residence where she is thought to have been seen at 6:30 a.m. the same day, was still being resolved.
Richardson’s remains were found about six or so miles from Lost Hills and about two or so miles from the rural location where she apparently stopped to rest on a back porch.
Although the find, according to spokespersons in the County Coroner’s Office, includes 90 or more percent of the skeleton when assembled, Baca said, “I don’t believe the remains are capable of telling us a story [that] would enable the determination of homicide.” The sheriff said he has asked the coroner’s office “to work to see if foul play” was involved.
Baca, at times visibly agitated by media questioning, staunchly defended his officers, but the LASD chief acknowledged that “[acting] properly doesn’t mean that we didn’t do something, or [that] we could have done something more.”
Appearing to shift some of the responsibility for what occurred to the staff of Geoffrey’s restaurant, which had called the Lost Hills Station directly when Richardson told them she could not pay her $89 dinner tab, Baca described “the irate owner or manager of the restaurant” telling us to come and pick her up.
A 57-page draft report of Office of Independent Review, supposed to serve as the watchdog panel for the LASD, essentially concludes that the LASD acted with due diligence. It too states that “the manager demanded” that Richardson be arrested.
Baca indicated that LASD policies on responses to “defrauding an innkeeper” charges would be reviewed. He said, “Because a restaurant owner…decides to make a citizen’s arrest, the deputies’ options are to field cite or take the individual to jail.” He added, “The question is [whether] defrauding an innkeeper of $89 is enough of a crime to take someone to jail?”
Baca said, “That is the issue, and I think that should be looked upon.”
To the question of when Richardson died, the sheriff answered, “It was within the sequence of her release.” A series of searches, including the single biggest field search in county history, combed nearby areas, and may have even come within less than a mile of the grisly find by state park rangers checking a remote former marijuana grove.
The chaparral in this area is so dense that the remains had to be helicoptered out. When asked if Richards could have walked the several miles from Dark Canyon and Piuma Road to the isolated site, Baca said, “I don’t know if she could walk that far.”
Richardson, an urbanite with no backcountry experience, was clad only in a T-shirt and jeans. Members of her family do not think she could have traversed the difficult terrain unless assisted or coerced by one or more individuals.
When LACCO spokesperson Ed Winter was asked about Richardson’s clothing, he said it “was around the scene,” and added he would “not say more at this time.” He indicated that the garments are still being analyzed.
Subsequent inquiry to the coroner’s office by the Malibu Surfside News was responded to with comments that the clothing believed to be hers was “scattered around” and was described to be in “fair” condition for items that may have been outside in the elements for almost 11 months.
There was no information about whether this might shed light on whether Richardson’s body was clothed when she died. If animal predators encountered clothed human remains, it is likely they would have shredded the garments. Pursuing this hypothetical issue might warrant further assessment of a possibility of human predation and foul play.
The discovery of a culvert covered with obscene hand-painted murals of African-American women with hairdos similar to that of Richardson compounds the family’s concerns about foul play. That mural, since painted over, was located a few miles to the northeast of the find site, and Latice Sutton believes the mural is related to what happened to her daughter.
RESTAURANT RESPONSE
Following the press conference, the owner of Geoffrey’s restaurant told The News that he has put in a call to Sheriff Baca, but has not heard back. Jeff Peterson said the sheriff’s comments, ostensibly shifting blame on the restaurant’s staff, exacerbated his already “devastated state after learning an hour earlier that the remains were Richardson’s.”
Jeff Peterson said his staff wanted to help the woman. The OIR draft report acknowledged that the staffers were going to chip in to cover her bill, but decided that they feared for her safety if she got back on the road in her condition in a car with dangling electrical wires under the dash and a large quantity of packaged alcohol in the trunk from a family event several weeks prior that had never been unpacked.
He said the three deputies who responded to the call were repeatedly told, “Something is wrong,” and “She needs help.” Peterson voiced concern that sheriff put emphasis on the restaurant’s citizen’s arrest and not on deputies’ assessment of the situation.
He said he couldn’t understand how Geoffrey’s employees saw one Mitrice Richardson and LASD personnel saw another.
The OIR report indicates that Richardson said she was meeting someone at the restaurant, someone named “Hannah [who is] tatted up,” or heavily tattooed, who apparently never showed up, which might explain why her dinner receipt is marked for a party of two.
Despite stressing the woman’s lucidity and self-awareness, the OIR report notes statements that Richardson would enter a trancelike state watching the lights in restaurant and became fixated on the moving numbers on the cash register screen, yet this did not raise a red flag.
According to the report, Richardson told staffers she was watching television in the break room at her office when “[she] stated [she] received a message from God and had to leave work.” She ostensibly then headed to Malibu.
When she was asked who to call for assistance with the bill, she is quoted as having said, “I do not have any parents. The only family I have is my great-grandmother.’
Peterson talked to members of the woman’s family circle on Thursday—one of whom said they could see that he “was in pain.” He told them, “We thought we were protecting her and others, if she was kept from driving on Pacific Coast Highway.”
He said the deputies who led her away in handcuffs did not have to do what they did. “What they did should not be represented as our actions. If we could see this was someone in distress, why couldn’t they?”
FEEDBACK
Noted Los Angeles African-American author and commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson described the LASD on Friday as having “vehemently denied any responsibility for Richardson’s disappearance. It exonerated itself in a lengthy report, which insisted it followed proper rules and procedures.”
He calls the report a “Pontius Pilate hand wash” and asks “if Richardson's family and friends hadn’t turned her case into a cause célèbre in the media... [would] she have been less than a mere footnote in the news?”
If members of the mainstream media’s questions could set off Sheriff Baca, the black blogosphere will undoubtedly produce even more of a reaction, if LASD officials are even aware of the complex network of African-American communications outlets that provide news and opinion to a community that largely views the mainstream media with indifference, if not contempt.
There are blogs with photos of Baca with the word “guilty” written across them. The sheriff is called a liar, and a murderer—and worse.
A petition drive is under way to demand that Baca and all LASD personnel who had contact with Richardson take independently administered lie detector tests in public.
There is an outpouring of outrage that a young woman who stood for the aspirations that most African-Americas families have for their own children—a college degree, a teaching credential, preparation for a doctoral program, the beauty pageants and even the club entertainment, is gone.
This drumbeat is expected to become ever louder in the weeks ahead.