Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [46]
In response to questions, Eli told the officers he had been at the Boys’ Ranch for only twelve days, since October 3, 2002, when a judge sentenced him to juvenile hall. He was allowed limited contact with his family—weekend visits and five-minute phone calls. His father had visited him on Sunday, October 6, and Susan had been to see him on October 13, while his father and brothers were driving to Los Angeles.
During her visit, Susan told Eli that his father was staying at a hotel while she was in town visiting from Montana for a few days. He didn’t know which hotel, only that his father was there because his parents were in the process of getting a divorce. Eli believed that Susan was in Montana looking at homes to buy and that she returned to deal with her financial affairs, mostly a “debate” with his father over “checks” and a court date that she missed. His parents had begun having problems the previous September, causing Felix to move to Berkeley. At the time, Susan said the marriage “was not working out.” She had given the house back to Felix then set out for Montana to find a place to relocate.
When asked if he could provide any information as to who might be responsible for his father’s death, Eli pointed to one of his father’s longtime patients, a man named Tom Pyne. “My dad had people, patients, who hated him,” Eli added, claiming some were “disturbed” and “wielded razor blades and hammers” when they came for therapy. Detective Gruenheid jotted the name “Tom Pyne” on a notepad, noting that she would check it out later.
When asked about a court proceeding the previous month in which his mother had been arrested for contempt, Eli said the hearing revolved around a violation of a “time out” while he was on electronic home detention for a probation violation. He was charged with “felony assault with a deadly weapon” in February of 2002 for striking a teenage boy in the face with a mini-flashlight in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. At the hearing in California Superior Court, he told Judge William Kolin that he had gone to the Jack in the Box that night to “get a look” at the boys who had jumped his friend and stolen the boy’s marijuana. Things got out of hand when the alleged victim and about twenty of his friends came after him. Eli unsuccessfully argued that he was only defending himself when he struck the teen in the face, breaking his nose and causing facial lacerations that required stitches.
Susan was uncooperative when officers came to the Miner Road house and presented her with a search warrant they had obtained after the assault. She refused to put the family dogs away and then blocked the officers from going upstairs to search for evidence that might tie Eli to the assault. Her difficult behavior continued when she would not tell them where the laundry room was located, since it was there that investigators believed they would find the garments Eli was wearing at the time of the assault.
Susan’s repeated attempts to prevent the officers from carrying out their search landed her in handcuffs, and Eli was temporarily placed in the custody of Felix, who at the time was living in the apartment at the couple’s Berkeley property on Arch Street.
In April 2002, Eli was ordered to meet with officers from the county probation department to determine an appropriate punishment. A confidential report to the court noted that Eli had adjusted well to juvenile hall. Yet when placed in his father’s custody on Juvenile Electronic Monitoring, he had violations for being “out of range” and “not complying with reporting on time to home supervision.”
Shortly after he was released into his father’s custody, Eli violated the court order by removing the ankle