This follows up to the Twin Peaks murder-suicide of a father and his 9 month old son, in the Tagle, Garcia case.

A newspaper article relates the sequence of events….

Family say courts shut down restraining orders

By Stacy Moore
Hi-Desert Star

TWIN PEAKS — Sunday’s murder-suicide was the culmination of months of threats and online and text rants from Stephen Garcia to Katie Tagle of Yucca Valley and her family.

The mother of a 9-month-old boy, Wyatt, with Garcia, Tagle was never able to secure a restraining order against him for herself or an order for supervised visitations for their son.

“This was preventable. This didn’t have to happen,” Tagle’s mother, Maria Brown said the day after Wyatt’s death.

“The system failed Wyatt. It cost him his life.”

Her family said Garcia abused Tagle throughout their two-year relationship, which ended in August 2009, when, her family said, he punched her in the face, knocking her unconscious.

Tagle brought Wyatt back to her family house in Yucca Valley, but frequently took him to visit Garcia’s parents in Piñon Hills. 

Garcia, her family said, did not seem especially interested in Tagle or their son until December 2009, when he discovered she was involved with another man.

“That’s when he wigged out,” Tagle’s sister Andrea Rodriguez of Hesperia said. 

In letters on a Web site he set up to chronicle his communications to her and her friends, Garcia cursed at Tagle and told her to return to him.

During one custody exchange with Wyatt, he proposed to her, then knocked her to the ground.

Judge denies first restraining order

On Dec. 15, Tagle asked for an emergency restraining order against Garcia, telling Judge Debra Harris in a Joshua Tree courtroom that Garcia had threatened Wyatt.

“He had sent me text messages before that if his son was around certain people … that he would kill him,” Tagle told the judge, according to transcripts of the hearing.

“And that if I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, he’d find me and kill me.”

“What about the threat to shoot you, where did that occur, to hunt you down and shoot you with a gun?” the judge asked.

“That was in a text message, Tagle replied.

When Harris asked for copies of the text messages, Tagle said she had no way of printing them out and her phone was shut off.

The judge denied the emergency order and set a hearing.

Garcia ‘doesn’t pose a threat’

At that hearing, on Jan. 12, Tagle went before Judge David Mazurek in the Joshua Tree courthouse to show cause for a restraining order.

“…On Dec. 31, we were doing our exchange, and he proposed to me, and I said no. He got angry and stole my phone and pushed me down. I made a police report about that,” Tagle told the judge, according to a transcript.

Garcia told the judge the report was “falsely made up.”

Mazurek denied Tagle the restraining order.

“If I grant the restraining order, how do you think that’s going to help with respect to you two being able to raise Wyatt together or work together to make sure Wyatt grows up happy and healthy?” the judge asked, according to the transcripts.

{{Pause for my blood pressure to go down . . . .   WELL, the judge had his way, and no NOW one is going to raise Wyatt.  That’s the benefits of the shared-parenting presumption when mixed with bad examples, like a man knocking down a pregnant woman.  What kind of potential do you think a man knocking down a pregnant woman because she didn’t accept his marriage proposal, and before that punching her in the face, might be for a Dad?  Great start in life, eh?}}

{{Go back to NOMAS and read Jack Straton, “what’s fair for children of abusive men?”   Like staying alive to at least adolescence???}}{{See Lundy Bancroft’s “The Batterer As Parent” book…}}  {{Well, what kind of society do we want?  Violent?  OK then, get those batterer Dads back in the action}}.

{{Consider if she’d punched HIM in the face!  Would she be in jail, AT ONCE?  Or would the father be put in a parenting class to teach him how to get along with her?  Yeah, sure…}}

“He would have both of us still,” Tagle responded. 

Asked about an e-mail in which he confessed to hitting Tagle, Garcia told the judge he had slapped her during a fight, but it was Tagle’s fault for “pushing and pushing and pushing until she could get something from me.”

Tagle pointed out she was nine months pregnant when Garcia hit her.

“I kind of get an idea of what’s going on,” Mazurek said.

So glad the judge “kind of got an idea.”  Are rulings from ideas, or from facts, and patterns of behavior?  He kinda forgot that assault and battery (which this was) is either an (A) misdemeanor or (B) felony.  …


He denied the restraining order, saying, “I don’t think that Mr. Garcia poses a threat to Ms. Tagle.” 

Mazurek went on to suggest Tagle might have ulterior motives for alleging domestic violence.

“I get concerned when there’s a pending child custody and visitation issue and in between that, one party or the other claims that there’s some violence in between. It raises the court’s eyebrows because based on my experience, it’s a way for one party to try to gain an advantage over the other,” he said, according to the transcripts.

 

WHICH CAME FIRST?  THE SEPARATION BECAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE, AND THEN BECAUSE OF THE SEPARATION, A CUSTODY/VISITATION ORDER (KNEE-JERK REACTION)?  OR THE CUSTODY/VISITATION ORDER AND then THE ALLEGATIONS OF VIOLENCE?  THE WOMAN SEPARATED TO START WITH BECAUSE OF VIOLENCE, IT SAYS!

WHAT NORMAL SINGLE MOTHER WITH ANOTHER CHILD AND A NEWBORN IS GOING TO SEPARATE FROM THE DAD?  SHE’D NEED THAT DAD’S HELP TO SOME EXTENT…  THERE IS GOING TO BE A REASON SOMEWHERE. 

Story predicts real-life ending

The day after the hearing in Mazurek’s courtroom, Garcia sent a text message telling Tagle to check her e-mail. In it was an anonymous message containing a story called “Necessary Evil.”

The story describes in detail Tagle’s and Garcia’s relationship, from their fights over his video-game addiction, to their breakup, to her new relationship and his failed proposal.

In the end, the story has two endings. In “Happy Ending,” the female character returns to the man.

In “Tragic Ending,” the character takes his son to a lake, puts him to sleep with Benadryl and the baby dies. “He will have a better life with you then (sic) we can give him here,” the man tells God before taking his own life.

Criminal Venue vs. Family Court Venue

Tagle called 9-1-1 after reading the story, and the responding deputy immediately went to the courthouse and obtained an emergency restraining order for her, signed by Mazurek.“Just from the very beginning, he didn’t want to listen,” said Rick Tagle, who was in the courtroom. “He started out by saying, ‘One of you is lying and I think it’s you,’ and pointing at Katie.”

The judge also allegedly warned Tagle there would be consequences for lying.

Lemkau did not respond to an e-mail request for comment; the county does not provide judges’ office telephone numbers.

The following Sunday, when Garcia missed his arranged custody transfer with Tagle, she had to call a deputy to get Wyatt back from Garcia’s house.

However, in Victorville court Jan. 14, Judge Robert Lemkau would not uphold the restraining order and ordered Tagle to immediately give Wyatt to Garcia, as it was the day his scheduled visitation was to begin.

Transcripts from that hearing are not yet available, but family and friends who were in the court that day with Tagle said the judge appeared not to have read the evidence she presented, including the “Necessary Evil” story and the emergency restraining order obtained by a sheriff’s deputy.

{{Been there, done that…}}

Friends say discouraged and frightened by her last appearance in court, she did not seek another restraining order or custody change.

“She was afraid she would go before the judge who called her a liar,” her sister said.

{{Had that feeling too, and hesitated because of it.  I have limits to my traumas…}}

 

Thanks to her family and friends, and Rick Tagle, for getting this information out to the papers, so the rest of the world can see the bad attitude women leaving violence get in these courts, as if the initial violence wasn’t bad enough.  Do you think Mazurek is going to say “oops!” and apologize to her family?  Or suffer some severe consequences for that screwup?

He DIDN’T screw up, from one point of view.  It’s simply one less set of customers for family strengthening classes, or parenting classes.  There are more where these came from….

As I’m blogging this — surprise, surprise — here’s another one in the papers, involving a restraining order.  No children, that I’m aware of, just some blood.

 Oy!!!, here’s the google search for that one.  As usual, it shows more than one:

Claw Hammer Restraining Order Ex Boyfriend

And the one in question:

Feb. 5–ANTIOCH (California)– Prosecutors charged a man with attempted murder and numerous other crimes Thursday, more than a week after a woman was severely beaten with the claw side of a hammer and pushed from a car outside a hospital.

The 39-year-old victim, whom police did not identify, had a fractured skull and a broken neck when she crawled inside the emergency room at Sutter Delta Medical Center at 2:20 p.m. Jan. 26 and suffered a seizure in the lobby. Doctors placed her in a medically induced coma.

She recently awakened and identified her attacker as ex-boyfriend Bradley Ruffin. She told police he had beaten her during an argument over a $1,000 winning lottery ticket.

Police reviewed surveillance video footage of her being pushed from a vehicle in the hospital parking lot. Officers then searched her court history and found that she had a restraining order against Ruffin, 47, stemming from a 2007 assault for which he was convicted.

A warrant was out for Ruffin’s arrest for violating probation, Antioch police Lt. Scott Willerford said.

Police drove to Ruffin’s home in the 2300 block of Peppertree Way and arrested him on the probation violation.

“He was in custody within a couple of hours,” Willerford said.

Now, let’s look at that info.  He assaulted her in 2007 (about 3 years ago, if that, right?) and went to jail.  Now he’s out again. . . . . Restraining orders around there, if I’m not mistaken, last about 3 years… 

Why was she around him at all?  For a damn LOTTERY ticket?

The victim told police that Ruffin had given her three scratcher lottery tickets, One of which was a winner of $1,000.

In the ensuing argument over how the winnings were going to be split, Ruffin allegedly struck her head six times with the claw side of a hammer.

When her head began to bleed, he at first told her to go wait in the street while he called an ambulance, the victim told police. When she could not move, he loaded her into a car and reclined her seat so no would see her.

When they arrived at the hospital and she could not exit the car on her own, he used his feet to push her out, police said. He then drove away, leaving her alone.

He didn’t want to go back to jail, obviously.  Maybe he thought she’d just die, and he’d not be nailed?  But why the hospital, then?

Ruffin is charged with attempted murder, battery with great bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, robbery, violating a restraining order and enhancements for the use of a deadly weapon and causing brain injury.

That’s why I call the restraining order process a JOKE.  And women, get smart!  JUST SAY NO (if possible, safely….)  Because this is the direction it’s going…Whether or not the person is actually punished for the prior violence.

He remained at the County Jail in Martinez without bail.

Roman Gokhman covers public safety. Contact him at 925-945-4780.

Read more: http://dailyme.com/story/2010020500002110/woman-beaten-hammer-fight-winning-lottery.html#ixzz0egref6du

In the Garcia case, the Family Court judge was, in his mind, obviously smarter than the sheriff who issued the EPO.

I actually READ some of the junk Garcia posted.  It’s volatile, for sure.