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Relatives sought help before kids were drowned
Grandmother asked social service agency for partial custody
- Jaxon Van Derbeken, Janine DeFao, Chronicle Staff Writers
Friday, October 21, 2005
Relatives of a mentally troubled woman from Oakland who reported hearing voices before she allegedly threw her three young sons into the bay to die said Thursday they had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Alameda County social service workers to help them gain custody of the children.
Members of the family of La-shuan Ternice Harris said they had argued that the 23-year-old woman was unstable and unfit to care for her boys -- 6-year-old Trayshaun Harris, 2-year-old Taronta Greely Jr. and 16-month-old Joshua Greely.
They had given up trying by Wednesday, when Harris went to the home of a cousin and told her she was going to feed her children to the sharks.
The cousin tried frantically to prevent Harris from leaving for San Francisco with her boys, but she failed, relatives said. At 5:30 p.m., police said, Harris took the children to the end of Pier 7 along the Embarcadero, stripped them naked and threw them in the water.
Taronta's body washed up more than four hours later at Fort Mason. The bodies of the other two children have not been found, and the Coast Guard suspended its search late Thursday, about the time Harris was formally charged with three counts of murder and three counts of child assault.
Her aunt, Joyce Harris of Oakland, said Thursday that Lashuan Harris' mother had contacted Alameda County social services officials about three months ago to seek partial custody of the children because Harris had stopped taking medication for schizophrenia and had made threats regarding the boys.
"They said she was sane, that they couldn't do anything,'' Joyce Harris said.
"Maybe she didn't try as hard as she could," she said of the children's grandmother. "She said, 'I just can't get the kids.' "
At the same time, Joyce Harris added, relatives thought the threats toward the boys were "just talk. But we were always encouraging her to get help."
A spokeswoman for the Alameda County Social Services Agency, Sylvia Soublet, would not discuss whether the family had contacted her agency about gaining custody.
But Soublet did say Lashuan Harris was a client.
"This family is receiving support from our agency,'' Soublet said. "Financial support, other kinds of sustainable support -- there are a lot of areas where families have issues.''
Mental illness alone would not be grounds for the agency to take children from a mother, Soublet said.
"Certainly if the grandmother were concerned, there would be other options to seek custody," she said.
While she would not say anything about any contacts the grandmother might have made with the agency about custody, she concluded: "We have not done an investigation in regard to these children."
Family members said Lashuan Harris began acting strangely about two years ago -- becoming hysterical and wandering out at night -- and was taken by ambulance to John George Psychiatric Pavilion, a county-run mental health center in San Leandro. They said she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Earlier this year, she went to live with her sister in Florida, where she said she started hearing voices in July. She committed herself to a hospital and stayed there two days, then came back to Oakland to live with her mother.
Harris told her family that she had been cured, and she stopped taking an anti-schizophrenia drug called Haldol.
"She needed that medicine," said her sister, Telicia Harris. "The doctors said if she didn't take it, things would get worse. When she was with us, in the family, we made sure she took it. But when she was by herself, we didn't know what she was doing."
Wednesday was the birthday of Lashuan Harris' grandmother, who died in November. The two had been close, and relatives said the anniversary may have made Harris upset.
That morning, family members said, Harris showed up at a cousin's home in West Oakland, talking about finding the nearest beach in San Francisco and feeding her children to sharks.
"That was something that came up out of the blue," said Avery Garrett, Harris' uncle.
The cousin called other family members in a vain effort to keep Harris from leaving. No one in the family called police, relatives said.
When San Francisco officers arrived at Pier 7 to try to rescue Harris' children from the water, they found her standing by the railing, hair disheveled, wearing a T-shirt that read, "Focus on Me," authorities said.
Family members said Lashuan Harris, the second youngest of four children, was born in Mississippi and moved to Oakland when she was young.
She attended Fremont High School but dropped out after becoming pregnant with Trayshaun. Later, she became a certified nursing assistant at a San Leandro nursing home but stopped working two years ago when she was having problems with her sons' father, Taronta Greely, said Harris' aunt DiAnna Harris.
In October 2003, as part of a domestic violence case against Greely, now 29, Harris sought custody of their two sons at the time.
"I have been a very caring and responsible parent," she wrote in a letter to a judge. "I feed, dress and wash our children daily with very little assistance from (Greely)."
Later, the two reconciled and had another son, Joshua. Police described Greely on Wednesday as distraught about what had happened to the boys.
After her return this summer from Florida, Harris stayed briefly with her mother, then with another aunt in East Oakland. After a falling-out there, about two months ago, she and the boys moved into the Salvation Army's Garden Street shelter in the Fruitvale neighborhood.
"By all appearances, she seemed to be a model person to have in our program," Salvation Army spokeswoman Kelly Gabel said. She described Harris as quiet and polite and said she kept herself and her children clean and well-fed.
A caseworker was helping her find transitional housing. Harris had been asked to put $400 in a savings account and had already saved $350, Gabel said.
Relatives, who continued to see Harris frequently while she spent nights at the shelters, said she would sometimes talk to herself, laugh at nothing, pace or just stare blankly.
But Gabel said no one at the shelter saw such behavior.
"That's what makes this even more shocking and terrible. There were no outward signs. There was nothing alarming about her demeanor," she said.
At the shelter, Harris and her sons slept in a small, bare room with five twin beds. On Thursday, the beds remained unmade, and toddler clothes littered the floor. A children's Bible sat on one bed next to a diaper. A toy punching bag hung from another bed frame with child-size boxing gloves nearby. A worn bag decorated with a teddy bear and stuffed with papers sat on a third bed.
Gabel described shelter workers as shattered.
"It's traumatic. It's crushing," she said. "These are babies, and they're gone."
At the nearby Manzanita Elementary School, where Trayshaun had started first grade in August, teachers and grief counselors were preparing to break the news to his schoolmates.
"Everybody is in a state of shock," principal Marsha Saks said. "Knowing it happened to one of our children is a blow."
Trayshaun's teacher, Geraldine Ferri, described him as a quiet, serious child who was a good student and was well liked by the other children.
"He was always right on task, trying to do his best all the time," she said.
Some family members said Harris had been a good and protective mother, disliking even to leave the boys with baby sitters.
"Even when she was out, she would worry about her kids," said Brandy Ellis, a cousin. "She wouldn't think of giving up her kids."
"If she was in the right state of mind, she would have never done anything like this," she said. "This is not the Lashuan Harris we know."
Chronicle staff writer Steve Rubenstein contributed to this report. E-mail the writers at
jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com and
jdefao@sfchronicle.com.
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