Video of Mitrice Richardson to be released
Wrongful death suit
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.
The judge also ruled that the plaintiffs are entitled to Los Anglees police records generated between September 2009, when the Cal State Fullerton graduate went missing, through Dec. 10, 2009.
Richardson's body was found Aug. 12 in Malibu Canyon by deputies and park rangers who were looking for illegal pot farms.
The LAPD was in charge of missing-persons investigation, because she lived with her grandmother in South Los Angeles.
The LAPD and lawyers for the Sheriff's Department argued that making the records public could jeopardize the investigation of Richardson's death, but the judge sided with the family.
Richard's divorced parents, Michael Richardson and Latice Sutton, filed separate wrongful death suits against the county last year. They are now consolidated.
Sutton's attorney, Leo J. Terrell, said he and his client were told that there was no video of the young woman, who was briefly locked up after exhibiting manic behavior and failing to pay a bill at Geoffrey's, a restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway.
Richardson, 24, was arrested Sept. 16, 2009. Investigators said she apparently had a mental breakdown after being awake for as many as five nights, according to diaries found in the car she was driving.
Sheriff's deputies summoned to the restaurant searched Richardson's car and found some pot, prompting them to impound it. Richardson was taken to the sheriff's station, where she was booked for failing to pay her bill and released about 1 a.m. Sept. 17, 2009—without her car or cellular telephone.
Deputies said Richardson passed a sobriety test, and she was let go. The station is in the 27000 block of Agoura Road, near the Ventura (101) Freeway, and the body was found several miles away in or near Malibu Creek State Park.
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.—The remains of a 24-year-old woman, whose decomposing body was found in Malibu’s backcountry nearly a year after she was released from the local sheriff’s station, were exhumed today at her family’s request in an attempt to determine how she died.
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.
The 11-month search for 24-year-old pageant winner, and Cal State Fullerton graduate Mitrice Richardson came to a tragic end recently, when her remains were found by park rangers who were looking for illegal marijuana plants in a Malibu ravine. She was found no more than two miles out of the range of the last major search for her.
