From Andy Furillo:
A judge today found a Sacramento man mentally "not competent" to stand trial for murder in the beating death of a 65-year-old woman who worked in the group home where the man had been confined because of an earlier assault.
Sacramento Superior Court Judge Judy Hersher suspended criminal proceedings in the murder case against Ofiu Edwards Foto, who has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and ordered that an "appropriate evaluation" be conducted to determine where the defendant should be placed.
Foto, 40, who stands 6-2 and weighs 300 pounds, was accused in the Sept. 5, 2008, fatal attack on Pausta Theresia Sibarini with a wooden chair in the 44th Street group home where she was employed. Sibarini's husband, Tumber Purba, 69, also was severely injured in the same Sandy's Guest Home assault.
The defendant's attorney, Emory King, said Foto will be referred to the state's Conditional Release Program for a recommendation on his placement. Depending on the evaluation, Foto could be referred to another placement in the community, such as a group home, or into a state mental hospital.
Hersher scheduled an Oct. 2 hearing on Foto's placement.
Foto was living in a group home at the time of the Sibarini homicide as a result of pleading no contest to the earlier group home assault. In that 2006 case, Foto broke the jaw of a 76-year-old woman and kicked her in the head. Prosecutors said they settled for Foto's no-contest plea in that case because they feared he would be found not guilty be reason of insanity.
At the conclusion of her court calendar this morning, Hersher declined to make the court file on the current Foto case available to The Bee. The judge's clerk said the file needed to be updated into the court's information management system and that it would not be immediately available.
Meanwhile, Tumbur Purba and other survivors of his wife's death filed a civil lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court today againt Sacramento County and the the state of California.
The lawsuit says that the county and the state should have known about Foto's "20 year history of violent attacks on others, numerous criminal convictions involving violent crimes and mental disorders, including chronic paranoid schizophrenia with auditory and visual hallucinations."
The civil defendants failed to warn Sibarani about Foto's past, the suit said.
Besides his 2005 attack on the 76-year-old woman, Foto also beat up a woman in Burlingame, breaking her jaw and knocking out three of her teeth. He also once smashed out the windows of a home in San Bruno and threatened to kill everybody inside.
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