Zackariah Lehnen, a 31-year-old transient, has been charged with two counts of murder in the case involving the deaths of Lucien Bergez and Erica Escobar.
We all remember the case of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the 1974 killing of a 17-year-old gas station attendant. In 1986, Horton was released under Massachusetts’ weekend furlough program but never returned. Ultimately, he committed assault, armed robbery and rape. The case was a classic example of the risks behind the early release of prisoners likely to commit serious crimes.
Almost a quarter of a century later, we have the case of Zackariah Lehnen, a 30-year-old transient paroled from a California prison after serving only five months of a 16-month sentence for drug possession. As recounted by Bloomberg reporter Christopher Palmeri, a program to reduce costs by freeing “nonviolent” prisoners without supervision allowed Lehnen to leave prison in November 2010.
A month after his release, Lehnen was in a state court in Beverly Hills pleading no contest to assault charges. Although he was on parole at the time and had prior convictions for spousal battery and drug possession, Lehnen was released again, unsupervised, on Dec. 23, as court records reported by Bloomberg show.
Six months later Lehnen was arrested and charged with murder in the torture and stabbing deaths of an 89-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman in a Los Angeles suburb. He is in jail with a plea hearing set for July 28.
Former military prosecutor and now Democratic state senator from Torrance Ted Lieu told Palmeri in a phone interview, “It’s a perfect example of what goes wrong when you prioritize saving money over public safety,” adding that Lehnen is an example of how the state’s system for sorting inmates by the risks they pose can fail.
Sen. Lieu gets it. We’ve been calling attention to this issue for well over two years. How many Zackariah Lehnens are needed to convince our elected leaders that the unsupervised early release of prisoners to save money is poor prioritization of public funds and a danger to society?
