Latice Sutton files second lawsuit against the county
Mitrice Richardson
LOS ANGELES, Calif.—The mother of a woman whose body was found nearly a year after her release from custody has filed a second lawsuit against the county, this time alleging deputies improperly removed her daughter's remains from the discovery site.
Latice Sutton is asking for unspecified damages, alleging negligence and both intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress.
Sutton's daughter, 24-year-old Mitrice Richardson, went missing in September 2009. The Cal State Fullerton student's body was found last August in Malibu Canyon by deputies and park rangers who were looking for illegal marijuana farms.
After the woman's body was found, coroner's staffers told deputies not to disturb the remains, according to the new complaint filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court.
"Despite these orders, the sheriff's deputies improperly removed the remains of Ms. Richardson from the discovery site,'' the suit alleges.
Three months later, Sheriff Lee Baca and a team of his deputies led Sutton and some of her family members to the site where they said Richardson's body was found, according to the lawsuit.
"After searching the site, a member of (Sutton's) family located a small human bone that had been left on the ground by either the sheriff's deputies who discovered the remains or the coroner who reported to the scene,'' the suit says.
Sutton claims that, based on her communications with the coroner's office, she later realized that the site Baca and his deputies took her to was not the same one from where her daughter's remains were actually excavated.
Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore declined to comment on the suit.
Sutton and her ex-husband, Michael Richardson, previously filed suits alleging that deputies failed to get needed medical assistance to their daughter and instead released her in the middle of the night from the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Agoura Hills, despite her strange and
unusual conduct.
Those suits were consolidated and are awaiting trial.
Their daughter was arrested and briefly incarcerated after exhibiting manic behavior and failing to pay a bill at Geoffrey's, an oceanside restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
Investigators said she apparently had a mental breakdown after being awake for as many as five nights, citing diaries found in the car she was driving.
Deputies summoned to the restaurant searched Mitrice Richardson's car and found some marijuana, prompting them to impound the vehicle.
LOS ANGELES, Calif.—The mother of Mitrice Richardson, whose remains were found in a ravine about 11 months after she was released from the sheriff's Malibu/Lost Hills Station, wants her daughter's body exhumed.
Latice Sutton has scheduled a news conference Monday to talk about her daughter's case. Sutton wants the FBI to look at whether sheriff's deputies moved the body improperly, without letting coroner's investigators examining it where it was found, and if authorities made a rush to judgment in ruling the death accidental.
MALIBU, Calif.—More bones were found on Sunday in a Malibu ravine where the remains of a Mitrice Richardson were found 11 months after she was allowed to walk away from a sheriff's station.
The goal of the search, which included coroner's investigators and a sheriff's homicide detective, was to find anything that could be related to the case of Mitrice Richardson, Steve Whitmore of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department told City News Service.
The parents of Mitrice Richardson, the missing 24-year-old who was found dead almost a year after being released from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Malibu station, have reached a tentative agreement to settle their lawsuits against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for $900,000.
LOS ANGELES, Calif.—Lawyers for the parents of a woman found dead in Malibu after being released by sheriff's deputies are entitled to video showing the woman's behavior inside and outside the jail and station house, a judge ruled today.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William F. Fahey ordered lawyers for the county to make the video of Mitrice Richardson available by tomorrow afternoon.
