Woods was arrested at home soon after, on May 12, and prosecutors charged him with murdering Lee on May 16. Woods could not be reached for comment, and a public defender who represented him at an initial court hearing did not respond to a request for comment.

After the case was filed, Cathy Lee, eager to review any document she could get her hands on, went to the courthouse to pull a copy of the criminal complaint.

She expected the document to be cut and dried. Instead, it left her stunned.

There was the murder charge, as expected, but also a second charge for felony assault with a deadly weapon. While both counts sounded reasonable for her father’s case, Lee noticed that the portion outlining the assault charge listed a different victim and an earlier date than her father’s attack.

At first, she thought a prosecutor must have copied and pasted the text from a different case and forgotten to update the second charge with the correct details. Lawyer friends told her that happens sometimes and that the discrepancy was probably a clerical error.

But it wasn’t.

The second charge concerned a separate attack that had occurred less than a week before her father was killed. Neither police nor prosecutors had mentioned it to her or her family before they had lumped the two cases into one.

Her shock made way to anger, she said, as the details of the earlier attack — on the campus of USC, her alma mater — became clearer.

Attack on campus

Late on the night of April 30, a 20-year-old mathematics student from Shanghai who goes by Jaime — and who asked The Times not to use his full name because he fears the suspect and doesn’t want his family in China to worry about him — was studying in a courtyard when he noticed a man in a hoodie lingering around.

Jaime had studied in the courtyard frequently, and he said he trusted USC and campus security to keep him safe there. Another student was studying there as well. Maybe, Jaime thought, the hooded man also was a student, or someone waiting for a friend.

“I feel like, ‘Oh, he’s just maybe a stranger on campus but not a bad guy,’” he recalled. He stuck with that line of thinking even after the man moved behind him, out of his line of sight.

Then, suddenly, he felt the man rush up from behind and stick something sharp to his neck, he said. He instinctively grabbed at the object with his right hand, pulling it away from his neck before it cut him there, and the man ran off, he said.

Jaime, whose hand was injured but not badly, said he believed the man had meant to kill him.

LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 27: A "Stop Asian Hate" rally in Koreatown on Saturday, March 27, 2021 attracted hundreds of participants. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

CALIFORNIA

L.A. County reports 76% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes

Oct. 20, 2021

Jaime said he and the other student in the courtyard went together to campus police and reported the incident. Not long after, campus police said they had a suspect in custody. Jaime said he went with officers and confirmed in person that the man — identified later as Woods — was the one who had attacked him.

Jaime said he was relieved Woods had been caught, with what Jaime was told was a sharpened metal hair pin still on him. He said he assumed Woods would be held in custody until trial, given how close he’d come to serious injury.

Unbeknownst to Jaime, Woods was released instead.

According to the LAPD, which was brought in by campus police to handle the investigation, detectives presented a case for felony assault with a deadly weapon against Woods to prosecutors in Gascón’s office, but the prosecutors rejected the filing. Instead, they passed it on to the city attorney’s office for misdemeanor consideration on May 4.

Lee was killed the next day.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-29/la-me-father-slain-daughters-search-for-answers

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5143236&forum_id=2#44770514)

A pattern of conduct’

When police and prosecutors realized Woods was the suspect in Lee’s killing, the attack on Jaime took on a new light.

According to LAPD Det. Larry Burcher, detectives “noted the similarities” between the two attacks with alarm, and asked prosecutors to reconsider filing a felony charge in the attack on Jaime when they presented the murder case in Lee’s death.

They also asked prosecutors to wrap the two cases into one, Burcher said, in order “to show a pattern of conduct by Woods, which strengthens both cases during any future prosecution.”

Prosecutors agreed and contacted the city attorney’s office on May 16 to say they wanted the USC case returned to their office. They filed the joint felony case the same day.

In a statement to The Times, Gascón’s office called Lee’s killing “horrific,” and said Woods would be held accountable.

“That we can promise,” the office said.

The office said prosecutors had not initially charged Woods with a felony in the USC attack because Jaime was not seriously injured, because Woods didn’t have a criminal history at the time and because the only weapon he had was the hairpin.

Prosecutors said they used the same “threshold” for determining what constitutes a felony assault as under previous administrations. They said the D.A.’s office “could only charge the assault as a felony if Mr. Woods used force likely to produce great bodily injury or used a deadly weapon.” At the time, they said, they “did not believe the evidence was sufficient to establish [the hairpins] were used or intended to be used as deadly weapons.”

While the circumstances of the attack on Jaime hadn’t changed with Lee’s killing, prosecutors viewing both attacks together “identified a pattern of conduct that elevates the seriousness of the initial assault” and warranted its refiling as a felony, the office said. And, while police said there was no specific evidence to suggest either attack was motivated by anti-Asian hate, the D.A.'s office said it is now considering the possibility that they were.

“Like our partners in the Asian American community, we are concerned about Mr. Woods’ pattern of alleged attacks that appeared to target Asian Americans,” the D.A.'s office said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5143236&forum_id=2#44770515)

(guy with British first name, Portuguese last name)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5143236&forum_id=2#44770678)

hth

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5143236&forum_id=2#44770661)