Seal Beach mourners frustrated at possibility of insanity defense
A day after Scott Dekraai was charged with killing his ex-wife and seven others in a shooting rampage at a Seal Beach beauty salon, friends and mourners reacted with frustration and anger to the suggestion by prosecutors that the defendant could mount an insanity defense.
“No matter how mental you are, you should not be killing people,” said Nighat Afreen, 55, of La Mirada, a onetime customer of Salon Meritage who stopped by Saturday to leave flowers and candles for her former stylists. “He was a mad dog. He should be killed.”
Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty against Dekraai, 41, who is being held without bail and in protective custody — a single jail cell away from other inmates, an Orange County Sheriff’s Department spokesman said.
Dekraai, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as the result of leg injuries from a 2007 tugboat accident, on Friday postponed entering a plea to eight counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder in order to assemble a legal defense team. Attorney Robert Curtis asked for a medical order for Dekraai to receive anti-psychotic medication while in custody.
Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackcauckas has said he would not be surprised by an insanity plea.
Several dozen people who gathered quietly Saturday to pay their respects at a memorial of flowers, candles and photographs outside Salon Meritage seemed disappointed by that prospect.
“It’s not fair to the victims” to blame Wednesday’s attack on mental illness, said Patricia Eskenazi, 74, president of the Los Alamitos/Seal Beach Rotary Club, a friend and customer of two of the slain stylists.
Dekraai was known to be unstable and short-tempered, she said, but that should not be an excuse. “He killed innocent people. They didn’t deserve it, all these families that he broke up.”
Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach, who represents the area, said there are many mental health services offered by the county and state that a person could access.
“I don’t know what more we could do to prevent this,” he said. “Sometimes people just snap.”
Moorlach was one of a group of elected officials and members of the Seal Beach Lions Club who met at the town’s Pavilions grocery store Saturday morning to help bag groceries and collect donations for families of the victims. The supermarket and a Vons in Los Alamitos have pledged to match up to $25,000 in donations made by customers in checkout lines over the weekend to benefit the Seal Beach Victims’ Fund.
An emotional Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who has represented the small beach town for more than 20 years, called the shooting “monstrous.”
“The fact that something this horrible could happen in a wonderful place like Seal Beach shows you there are some evil forces in this world,” he said. “And the good people have to stand together.”
He welled up with tears as he hugged Suzanne Finamore, whose brother-in-law, salon owner Randy Fannin, died in the attack.
Finamore said her sister, Sandy Fannin, is “very, very fragile” as the family has struggled to understand what might have driven Dekraai to such violence. “We can’t wrap our mind around it. We can’t make sense of it. We’re just trying to pull together and pray as a family.”
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