Where was help for Alesia?

The official police account is terse and clear:

Alesia Thomas left her two children, 12 and 3, outside a police station in Southeast Los Angeles in the middle of the night. When LAPD officers went to her apartment to find out why, she told them she was addicted to drugs and couldn’t take care of the kids. They tried to place her under arrest but she “actively resisted� and a struggle ensued.

A short time later, she was dead.

A patrol car camera captured some of the action: She’d been wrestled to the ground and stomped.

The case barely made the news when it happened in July. Now it’s become the centerpiece of three violent use-of-force cases dogging the Los Angeles Police Department.

Last week, a handcuffed woman was slammed to the ground in Tujunga after arguing with officers over a cellphone ticket. Last month, a 20-year-old skateboarder was punched by an officer in Venice after he was stopped for riding along the wrong side of the street.

The three incidents have sparked public concern about whether the department is backsliding on its commitment to civility and restraint.

Police Chief Charlie Beck says the cases are aberrations, not reflective of the department. All are being investigated; a captain in the San Fernando Valley case has already been demoted.

Amid evidence that Thomas was threatened and kicked as she was being arrested, the five officers involved are temporarily off street duty.

But the case has me wondering about something more basic and abstract than police brutality claims:

How did this troubled woman morph from desperate struggling mother into dangerous criminal suspect?

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She might have been a drug addict, but give her credit: She didn’t dump her kids at a crack house.

But when Alesia Thomas, a single mother, left her 12-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter on a sidewalk outside a police station in South Los Angeles in the middle of the night, that act alone landed her on the wrong side of the law.

Abandoning her children that way was criminally irresponsible, said LAPD Asst. Chief Michel Moore, who heads investigations for the department.

“If that mother has problems and couldn’t live up to the responsibilities of being a parent, she should have sought help from family members� or social workers at the Department of Children and Family Services, he said.

“If she chooses not to do that and subjects the children to conditions that endanger them, then she is committing a crime. And we consider child endangerment a very serious crime.�

But just because you can arrest somebody, does that mean you ought to? Thomas’ children were turned over to social workers and are living with her mother now. I can’t help but think Thomas might still be alive if police had kept the handcuffs on their belts and offered, instead, a helping hand.

Moore said that’s the kind of “rear-view mirror approach� to police work that makes officers’ jobs so hard.

When her children walked into the police station, officers were sent to Thomas’ apartment “to find out what was she thinking, why did she do this, what’s the environment like,� Moore said.

She was “impaired� when they got there, the officers said, and told them something to the effect of: I don’t want these kids.

“It’s not our responsibility to turn a blind eye and say, ‘Well, she’s got a drug problem and she’s just a victim’ or whatever.�

Addiction might be an explanation, but it’s not an excuse for a crime, he said.

“She shifted the responsibility of caring for her children to the Police Department.... Our responsibility includes holding the mother accountable for that,� Moore said.

In hindsight, Moore said, he wonders too if they should have done things differently. “Was this the best means, the wisest route? Unfortunately, we’ll never know because of the tragedy that she suffered.

“We’re the agency of last resort. At 2 in the morning, there’s no one else for us turn to and say, ‘Hey, can you handle this problem for us?’�

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Her family members insist that Alesia Thomas wasn’t addicted to drugs. “Drug addicts don’t function,� her mother, Sondra Thomas, told me. “And she could function very well.�

Her children were clean, well-dressed, well-fed. When she went to clean out her dead daughter’s apartment, “the refrigerator was stocked with food,� she said, including a giant box of those frozen waffles her son liked so much.

“Her kids had every video game you can call the name of,� Sondra Thomas said. “She had a mixer, a blender, a washer and dryer, there was everything in there she needed for her and her kids.�

Everything, it seems, except someone who understood what she might be going through.

“She was depressed, and tired. Real tired,� her mother recalled. “The kids were getting on her nerves.� She had been feuding with her son over his obsession with video games.

Several hours before she left her kids at the police station, she called her brother for help, her mother told me. She wanted him to come by and talk with her son because he wouldn’t listen to her. The brother told her to put her foot down and stop letting a 12-year-old “be the man of the house.�

Her mother wonders why police didn’t do more to help — “send some officers over to sit down with her and have a little talk. Say, ‘What issues are you suffering from? What’s the problem? You don’t have money? You don’t have help with your kids?’ Couldn’t they have done that?�

Couldn’t her mother have done that, I wonder? Or her brother? Or her friends?

We’ll never know what Thomas was thinking when she dropped her children off, or what she might have put her family through in the years that led to that moment.

I’m struck not just by the horror of her untimely death, but by her struggle to find a way to live, her unacknowledged need for help.

The final moments of her life played out in front of her apartment, among the liquor stores, churches and beauty shops that line that desolate stretch of South Broadway.

Across the street from her building is a counseling center, Coalition of Mental Health Professionals. They don’t take private insurance or Medi-Cal. Fees are on a sliding scale, but the receptionist warns me that “it’s not cheap.� Its logo outside the building says: “Creating Jobs. Strengthening Families.�

And right next door to her apartment, the drug treatment program Helping Hands Recovery Center offers this promise on its wall: “Helping People Help Themselves.�

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