Tough love ends in family tragedy
A father's decision not to bail out his son ends with the son being severely beaten by fellow inmates in L.A. County jail and left with permanent brain damage.
Thadd McNamara was at the helm of his motor home on a cross-country trip in 2005 when his cellphone rang and a neighbor gave him the news: His grown son, Sean, was in trouble with law -- again.
McNamara and his wife turned around in Corpus Christi, Texas, and headed back home to Rolling Hills Estates. On the way, McNamara made several calls in an effort to piece together why his 41-year-old son had been arrested.
It turned out Sean McNamara was accused of burglarizing his father's home and attempting to make off with a baseball cap bearing the logo "Snap-On Tools."
It was classic Sean, his father would later say. Nothing serious. Just another knuckle-head move from an overgrown kid who drank too much beer, didn't pay his bills and, essentially, refused to grow up. Thadd even had a phrase from his Catholic school Latin that he used to describe Sean -- puer eternus -- or eternal boy.
This time, McNamara decided, he wasn't going to bail out his son.
He pressed charges, banking on a prosecutor's assurance that Sean would be ordered to undergo alcohol counseling as a condition of his probation, if he was convicted.
"You don't want to see your kid in jail," McNamara said in a recent interview. "But I felt that him being put in rehab was going to be good for him."
But Sean never made it to rehab.
He was nearly beaten to death in a Los Angeles County jail after being placed in dorms with about 200 fellow inmates, many of them violent members of the Southsiders gang. McNamara was attacked when the guard who was supposed to be watching them left his post.
The attack, in which inmates allegedly jumped from third-tier bunks onto his head as he lay on the floor, left him with permanent brain damage.
His father filed a lawsuit against the Sheriff's Department, which runs the jails. County lawyers in March tentatively agreed to pay Sean's medical bills for life which, coupled with attorney's fees, are projected to be about $900,000. The case was settled the day trial was set to begin.
Sonia Mercado, the McNamaras' attorney, argued in court papers that jailers never should have put the nonviolent low-risk offender in with violent gang members of another race. She also accused the deputy who was assigned to the area where the beating occurred of improperly "abandoning his post."
