BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
A judge has declared a mistrial in the case of a woman who randomly slit the throat of a girl in downtown Palo Alto after the woman had a medical emergency in the courtroom.
Kenisha Thomas, 41, was put on medication before the trial to make her competent enough to be prosecuted.
Her public defender, Aaron Jaques, said in an interview yesterday that he thinks Thomas will be restored to competency with better medication and a more accurate dosage. A doctor will meet with Thomas and write a report.
The trial would have to start over with a new jury.
Jaques said he couldn’t disclose the nature of the medical emergency for Thomas’s privacy. It happened before the jury came into the courtroom at the San Jose Hall of Justice, he said.
Immediately after the medical emergency, Jaques argued that Thomas wasn’t competent to stand trial, and Judge Arthur Bocanegra agreed and declared a mistrial.
The 12-member jury was told the trial would wrap up around the second week of August. But Thomas’s medical emergency threw a wrench in those plans, and Bocanegra dismissed the jury rather than holding them until September when a doctor’s report is expected to be done.
“It’s a big inconvenience to the judge, the prosecution and the jury to throw out everything we’ve done and start from the beginning,” Jaques said yesterday. “But she does have a long and well-documented history of mental illness.”
Thomas randomly attacked a 16-year-old girl in a crosswalk at University Avenue and Emerson Street on Aug. 19, 2021. Thomas slit the girl’s throat, and then jumped on her and stabbed her in the cheek and chin.
Bystanders tackled Thomas and dislodged a knife from her hand, video from the incident shows.
The girl, who was on a break from Palo Alto High School with her friend, still has scars from the attack and won’t be testifying against Thomas, Deputy District Attorney Tessa Stephenson told the jury on July 19.
In his opening argument, Jaques said he anticipates a jury will find that Thomas is guilty, so he will argue that she is not guilty by reason of insanity.
“There’s another story to be told — and that’s (Kenisha) Thomas’s story,” Jaques said.
Jaques said yesterday that his strategy will be the same when the trial resumes.
Thomas told Dr. Michelle Vorwerk that she was hearing a voice in her head saying that she is a circus monkey or a lab rat. The government was reading her mind, and the only way to stop it was to kill herself and her daughter, Thomas said, according to Jaques.
Thomas also told Vorwerk that she was sexually abused as a child and sexually assaulted as an adult, and she struggled with homelessness for much of her life.
In 2012, Thomas stabbed her 8-month-old daughter five times during a supervised visit at a social services center in Baltimore.
She was found not criminally responsible for attempted murder and was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Thomas had a warrant for officers to bring her back to a hospital in Maryland at the time of the attack in Palo Alto.
She belongs in a mental institution for life. Guilty by reason of insanity.