José Tomás Mejía was a beloved husband and service worker when he died in a senseless stabbing at the hands of a teen he'd never met. His killer had schizophrenia and desperately needed treatment. How does a court find justice in such a complicated juvenile case?
To Dora Molina, the teenager who took her husband’s life is a danger to the public and needs to spend up to 30 years behind bars, about the same amount of time she and José Tomás Mejía were together., who spent his life fighting on behalf of others.
“This justice system was never meant to work for Black and brown people and people of color,” said Alejandra Valles, secretary treasurer and chief of staff of the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West, but more important, Mejía’s friend. “Criminal justice reform shouldn’t mean that there is no accountability and that you can brutally take someone’s life and get a slap on the wrist.
“The word justice is spoken of, and the word closure is spoken of. I don’t believe there is such a thing as closure at all, especially in a case like this, because everybody is forever changed by what happened here,” said Judge Christina L. Hill. “And the issue of justice — what is justice in a case like this?”José Tomás Mejía, a janitor, spent years fighting for fellow workers in California. He was killed in the apartment building where he worked.
His mother also may have struggled to care for him because of her diagnosis. At age 4, the boy was not toilet trained and still slept in the same bed as his ailing mother. A janitor at Park La Brea, Mejía was working on the fifth floor of Tower 33 when the teenager approached him holding a knife. There was a confrontation, and he stabbed Mejía more than a dozen times. The young man took Mejía’s keys and tried to use them to get into his girlfriend’s apartment.The girl’s father opened the door and saw the teen covered in blood and holding a knife, so he shut him out, according to a police report. Soon after, the teen banged on the door.
The teen, “didn’t fully comprehend what he was doing there or really what had happened,” the lawyer said. “He wasn’t in reality. It wasn’t until he began medication and treatment that he came back.”
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