The father of three children allegedly drowned by their mother is asking a judge to compel a psychologist to produce records from her sessions with the woman, saying the medical professional is wrongfully withholding them by contending they contain sensitive information.
In his Pasadena Superior Court suit filed in April 2022 against the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, plaintiff Erik Denton alleges Los Angeles Police Department members were negligent and did not take seriously the indications that the mental health of Liliana Carrillo, the mother of the two girls and one boy, was declining and did not share information they had with county social workers.
In October 2024, a judge found that Carrillo, then 33, was insane at the time of the April 10, 2021, killings of her 6-month-old daughter Sierra, 3-year-old daughter Joanna and 2-year-old son Terry. In court papers filed Friday with Judge Jared D. Moses in advance of a July 10 hearing, Denton’s attorneys are asking that the judge order psychologist Nichole M. Vienna, who evaluated Carrillo’s mental state in connection with the criminal case, be ordered to turn over her report and any related records.
“This information is relevant to plaintiff’s claims against the city and county of Los Angeles in this case, which center upon Carrillo’s dangerous mental state and the city and county’s actions in response to reports they received regarding Carrillo’s mental state posing a danger to her children before their deaths,” Denton’s attorneys state in their court papers.
Denton’s attorneys further note in their pleadings that another professional who interviewed Carrillo, Dr. David S. Rad, a psychiatrist, wrote in his report that Vienna opined that Carrillo has a mental disease “within the mood disorder spectrum complicated by symptoms of expansive moods … agitation, racing thoughts, delusions and disordered thinking and behavior that impairs her daily functioning.”
Vienna also believed Carrillo was incapable of knowing or understanding that her act was morally wrong, Rad said, according to Denton’s attorneys’ court papers. But in response to their May subpoena, Denton’s attorneys state Vienna said she would not produce any records because they contain sensitive information, according to the plaintiff’s lawyers’ pleadings.
Vienna’s findings have already been disclosed and shared in the criminal prosecution, and with the criminal court, so there is nothing confidential or privileged about her interviews and examinations of, or conclusions regarding, Carrillo’s mental health when she allegedly killed her three children,
In an interview from jail following her arrest, Carrillo told a reporter for the Bakersfield NBC affiliate KGET that she killed her children because she feared their abuse and sexual assault at the hands of others.
“I drowned them,” she said of her children. “I wasn’t about to hand my children off to be further abused.”
When asked by the KGET reporter if she regretted her actions, she said, “I wish my kids were alive, yes. Do I wish that I didn’t have to do that? Yes. But I prefer them not being tortured and abused on a regular basis for the rest of their life.”