Mental illness, Occupy protest figure into Berkeley hills homicide

On Saturday night, a 67-year-old resident in the Berkeley hills was beaten to death outside his home in a neighborhood described as an affluent area. Police have arrested a 23-year-old man, whom they found nearby 15 minutes after responding to the attack.

Two very hot-button issues have emerged in the case.  The first is that the suspect, Daniel Jordan Dewitt, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, his mother told the Oakland Tribune. The second is that police didn't respond to a first phone call made from the victim,  Peter Cukor, because officers were tied up in monitoring an Occupy protest that was moving from Oakland into Berkeley. 


Comments are streaming into a story on the case posted on the Berkeleyside blog.

With DeWitt's mother saying she had tried but failed for four years to get her son checked into a long-term mental health facility, debate has erupted over the nation's broken mental health system and the rights and wrongs of institutionalizing people with mental illness. 

"I can't tell you how many times he has been in and out of the hospital," Candy Dewitt told the Oakland Tribune. She said her son didn't appear to suffer any mental health problems as he attended Alameda High School and played football. But around the time he was 18, he started to show symptoms. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He would go into the hospital, respond well to medication and then get released, Candy DeWitt said. Once out of the hospital, he did what a fair number of people with mental illnesses do -- he stopped taking his meds.

“Our system is such that they go in, they shove them full of all kinds of antipsychotics and put them back out on the street again,” DeWitt told KTVU Channel 2.

The other touchy subject comes from Berkeley police saying they received a call from the victim's hillside address in northeastern Berkeley at 8:45 p.m.  In a statement, Berkeley police Capt. Michael Meehan said the department received a report of a suspicious person possibly trespassing. "The caller reported an encounter with an unknown person “hanging around” his property, and asked that an officer be sent to investigate.

Because of concerns about "the potential for violence" associated with a protest march moving from Oakland into Berkeley, the department would only respond to criminal, in-progress emergency calls, Meehan said.


A "source familiar with the case" told the Tribune that Cukor and his wife arrived home, found the suspect near their garage, asking to see a woman. They told the suspect there was no one there by that name and asked him to leave. Berkeley police Lt. Andrew Greenwood said the victim called the non-emergency line and "calmly reported" an encounter with a strange person on his property.

Cukor apparently walked to a nearby fire station, possibly to summon medical help for the trespasser. Firefighters were out on a call. When Cukor returned to his property, he was pushed to the ground, dragged into some bushes and severely beaten.

At 9 p.m., Meehan said, an officer offered to respond to one of two pending "suspicious circumstances" calls. One of those was the call made from Cukor. The officer's offer was declined because the call wasn't deemed an in-progress emergency call, Meehan said. Two minutes later, at approximately 9:02 p.m., Berkeley police received a phone call reporting an attack in progress.

Within a minute, officers were dispatched and drove to the crime scene with their emergency lights and sirens going. Paramedics arrived and treated Cukor but he later died.

With regard to the claim by police that their officers were tied up, save for in-progress emergency calls, one Berkeleyside reader bemoaned the department's readiness to point fingers at the Occupy movement.

 "If we're going to point fingers at Occupy," wrote another. "Why not also point fingers at the folks who cut California's mental health budget last year?"





 

How did an elderly Richmond woman wind up dead, in a burning car in suburban Lafayette?

That's the big question, and the big reason that Contra Costa Sheriff's Deputies have labeled the death of Eiko Sugihara "suspicious."

I'll say it sounds suspicious, as well as terribly sad. Sugihara, who survived a Japanese interment camp, according to KTVU news, leaves behind a family who is devastated. The killing is also disturbing, in part because of its geographic associations to another notorious Lafayette tragedy.

At about 6 p.m. December 4, the 86-year-old woman's burning 1990 Lexus was found 15 miles from where she lives in Richmond. The car was still ablaze when authorities found it, and it was on the edge of an embankment off Hunsaker Canyon Road, a remote, private road that leads out of Lafayette's Burton Valley. 

Off-the-beaten-track Hunsaker Canyon Road made national news back in October 2005. That's when Pamela Vitale, the wife of well-known defense attorney and aspiring cable TV news legal analyst Daniel Horowitz, was found savagely beaten to death in her Hunsaker Canyon Road home. The Horowitz/Vitale home--a mobile home at the time while their nearby Mediterranean mansion was being completed--is all the way at the top of Hunsaker Canyon Road. 

Sugihara's car, by the address listed in police reports, was found much further down the road and much closer to the road's entrance at the edge of the Burton Valley neighborhood.


For several hours before her car was found, Sugihara was at Hilltop Mall in Richmond, getting her hair done. Sugihara's hairdresser said she arrived at the mall for a hair appointment at the JC Penney hair salon and left at 3:30 p.m. Police said surveillance video from the mall parking lot shows here getting into her car about 45 minutes later.


Investigators don't know what happened after she left the mall. Unfortunately, her body was so badly burned in the fire that investigators haven't been able to determine the cause of her death, Sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee has told news reporters.

Besides Sugihara being found so far from home, the thing that really puzzles me, and perhaps investigators, is this thing about Hunsaker Canyon Road. Why here?

If you were her killer, if she was murdered, why choose Hunsaker Canyon as the place to leave her body?

It is a winding road that leads out of one of our suburban towns into the country and up into the hills. We have roads like that all over Contra Costa County. And, sure, once in a while, those roads, or sites just off them, are used as body dumping grounds for people who kidnap and kill others.

But from what I recall, killers who use this remote-road body disposal method, use roads that aren't so--well--remote as Hunsaker Canyon. They use roads that lead directly out of a town, roads like Alhambra Valley or Bear Valley or San Pablo Dam. These even lead you from one town on one side of the county to another.

Or they might use a dead-end road that is still just a left or right turn off a major thoroughfare, such as Bollinger Canyon Road, which, on on the south end, is accessible from San Ramon's Crow Canyon Road, and on the north end, off Lafayette's St. Mary's Road.

But Hunsaker Canyon Road. First, it's a dead end, leading to nowhere, except for an eclectic collection of homes set among many acres. Oh, there is a resort used for parties and weddings, but that's the only so-called destination. Hunsaker Canyon Road isn't even known as having a trailhead into any East Bay Regional parklands.

Second, you wouldn't find it easily by driving around looking for a place to dump a body. You need to wind around a lot of suburban side streets in Burton Valley. You probably wouldn't know Hunsaker Canyon Road was there unless you lived in Burton Valley or Lafayette, or you knew someone who lived on it. I didn't know Hunsaker Canyon Road existed until the Vitale killing.

What I'm saying is that whoever drove Sugihara to Hunsaker Canyon Road, even if it was somehow Sugihara herself, probably needed to know that Hunsaker Canyon Road existed, or that this portion of Lafayette offered this way-off-the-beaten-track place to leave a body, in order, it seems, to avoid or delay detection of a crime.

Investigators are asking anyone with information about Sugihara on that day to contact them at (925) 313-2632.