Eugenics,a moral dilemma.

[Carleton Hughes]

How the hell do you judge something like this?

vFamily: S.F. Mother Made Threats Before

By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 17 minutes ago

SAN FRANCISCO - The woman charged with tossing her three sons into San Francisco Bay has been battling schizophrenia and once said she was going to feed the boys to the sharks, family members said.
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Lashuan Harris, 23, was charged with three counts of murder Thursday while anguished relatives kept vigil and rescuers combed the chilly water for the bodies of two of the young victims.

Harris was being held in a hospital jail ward and was scheduled to be arraigned Friday.

Family members said Harris, who had been was hospitalized twice this year and had received outpatient psychiatric treatment, had made threats before. An aunt told the San Francisco Chronicle the threats had prompted the woman's mother to contact authorities, but others said they didn't think Harris would actually kill her children.

"She told my mama she was going to feed them to the sharks," said Britney Fitzpatrick, Harris' 16-year-old half sister. "No one thought it was that serious."

According to a police report, the 23-year-old Harris was heeding voices in her head when she went to San Francisco and dropped her children off a pier into the chilly water Wednesday night.

The former nurse's assistant had been living with her boys in a Salvation Army homeless shelter since September.

The body of Harris' middle child, Taronta Greeley, 2, was recovered late Wednesday near the St. Francis Yacht Club, about two miles from Pier 7. The other two boys — Treyshun Harris, 6 and Joshoa Greeley, 16 months — remained missing, but were presumed dead after so many hours in water with a swift current and temperatures in the low 50s.

The
U.S. Coast Guard called off its search Thursday afternoon, but the San Francisco police and fire departments continued to scour the bay until after dark.

Demarcus Harris, Lashuan Harris' cousin, said the last time he saw her was Tuesday at his sister's house in Oakland and the boys were with her.

When his cousin left, she said goodbye and "I'm going to miss y'all." He said neither he nor his sister suspected what she would do the next day. "We all thought she was just going home," he said.

Harris was hospitalized in January at the John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro and her mother was briefly granted custody of the boys, according to her older sister, Telicia Harris, 26.

Alameda County social service workers concluded after the first hospital stay that Lashuan was fit to care for her sons, Telicia Harris said.

Lashuan Harris' aunt, Joyce Harris, told the Chronicle for Friday's editions that Lashuan's mother had contacted social services officials about three months ago to seek partial custody of the children. She made the request because Harris had stopped taking medication for schizophrenia and had made threats regarding the boys, the paper reported.

"They said she was sane, that they couldn't do anything," Joyce Harris told the newspaper.

Sylvia Soublet, a spokeswoman for the Alameda County Social Services Agency, told the Chronicle she could not discuss whether the family had contacted her agency about gaining custody.

Harris told investigators she had taken the anti-psychotic drug Haldol to control her schizophrenia but stopped when she got her symptoms under control over the summer, according to the police report.

But she said the voices returned Tuesday night and were still with her when she put her children into the water, according to the report.

Asked why she didn't seek help from a doctor on Wednesday, Harris said she didn't know but thought the clinics would be closed.

"Lashuan is very protective of the children and I think one of the reasons Lashuan stopped taking her medication was for fear of losing her three children," an uncle, Avery Garrett, told NBC's "Today" show Friday.

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