Increasingly, it appears the upcoming jury trial for National Guard murder suspect Scott Ansman will not last long. One week, Dep. District Atty. Joseph Markus estimated yesterday morning at a hearing in the courtroom of Judge James Drabney.
No one would say this was an open and shut case, gaining a conviction in the stabbing and battering death of JoAnn Crystal Harris, who was pregnant. But neither does it look complicated, court sources said after Sgt. Ansman pleaded not guilty.
The prosecution, which lodged two counts of first-degree murder charges, with special circumstances attached, against the defendant, will seek a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Precision and Discipline
Not in dispute are several salient facts in the wake of the crime. Sgt. Ansman called the cops minutes after Ms. Harris and her unborn baby were whacked to death. He was the only living person on the premises. Authorities never have considered accusing anyone else of the charges the South Bay resident faces.
Late on a Friday afternoon last summer, from an office inside of the National Guard Armory, Culver City, Sgt. Ansman dialed 9-1-1 to report a dead body on the nearby gymnasium floor. Yards away, quite within view, the community’s largest celebration of the year, Fiesta La Ballona, was about to launch.
According to police, when they arrived at the Armory, the suspect was calmly mopping up the gym floor, presumably of the blood spilled during the violent scuffle with Ms. Harris.
At the time of the Aug. 24 homicide, Sgt. Ansman, a 35-year-old married father of three, including a newborn, had spent nearly all of his adult life in the military. In the tense moments following the crime, he may have been responding with the precision and the discipline required of his profession.
An Interlude of Consolation
At earlier hearings at the Airport Courthouse, Sgt. Ansman looked reasonably fresh. Yesterday, he appeared hapless, worn down, perhaps, by almost seven months of incarceration. As a sheriff’s deputy escorted him from the courtroom, the defendant fleetingly glanced toward the public seating area. But he did not see any faces he recognized.
Three members of the Ms. Harris’s circle were in attendance. Afterward, they met in the corridor with Mr. Markus for several minutes. Three separate times, he assured them how sorry he was about Ms. Harris’s fate.
Sgt. Ansman has told his family he was acting in self-defense against Ms. Harris. The fatal dispute, by his telling, may have been sparked when he allegedly told her that after their baby was born, he was going to take the child and raise him. He said he was convinced Ms. Harris was endangering herself and their baby with drugs and alcohol.
