Random attack on Seattle woman underscores courts’ challenges with mental health
Jan. 15, 2026 at 6:00 am Updated Jan. 15, 2026 at 7:00 am
Jeanette Marken, 75, at the Amazon Spheres in March. She was randomly attacked outside the King County Courthouse on Dec. 5 while waiting for a traffic light to change. (courtesy of Andrius Dyrikis)
Titanium implants were inserted into Jeanette Marken’s face at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center to stabilize her right eye socket and cheekbone. The 75-year-old is nursing a broken nose and recovering from two surgeries, and could need another operation down the road. She’ll never see out of her right eye again.
It’s been nearly six weeks since Marken, who is originally from Colombia and moved to Seattle in 2011, was bludgeoned in the face by a stranger outside the King County Courthouse at Third Avenue and James Street as she waited for the streetlight to change at noon on a Friday.
As she heals at home, Marken and her family are trying to make sense of what happened and are preparing for what could become a lengthy court process.
“It’s like adapting to a new normal,” and constantly needing a few seconds after waking to remember, “that’s my reality — I didn’t dream it,” said Marken’s younger son, Andrius Dyrikis. “It’s still extremely difficult.”
The suspect’s story is a familiar one in the criminal legal system: A person with severe mental illness trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of jail bookings, court hearings and rounds of therapeutic treatment, largely for misdemeanor offenses. Their escalation to brutally attacking someone unprovoked reflects the difficulty police and courts face in trying to prevent random violence and hold offenders accountable, while also tending to their mental health.
Marken’s alleged attacker, Fale Pea, was convicted of misdemeanor assault six times between 2020 and 2024, prosecutors noted last month when asking a judge to set high bail for the alleged assault on Marken, though the last time they were convicted of a felony was more than 13 years ago, for a stabbing at a SeaTac party.
In recent years, Pea, who was most recently diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and was unhoused at the time of the attack, has been in and out of jail and Seattle Municipal Court for a series of misdemeanor offenses, though none of those crimes resulted in the level of violence seen in the alleged attack on Marken.
Mental illness by itself is a poor predictor of whether someone will cause harm, and most people with those conditions are not violent, said forensic psychologist Sarah Kopelovich, speaking generally.
“We know that people with serious mental illness are more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses that are connected to untreated symptoms but also to homelessness and survival behavior,” said Kopelovich, who is an associate professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Marken, a gig delivery worker alongside her 80-year-old husband, a retired mechanical engineer, was on her way to pick up a food order when she was struck by a person wielding a wooden stick with a long screw jutting from one end. Video surveillance cameras captured the seconds-long assault.
“She felt the impact, and she fell sideways. She didn’t lose consciousness, but she was bleeding a lot,” Dyrikis, translating for his mother as she recounted the attack in Spanish, said in a phone interview. “In that moment, she knew already that she lost her eye.”
Witnesses rushed to help. They called 911 and applied pressure to Marken’s wounds. King County sheriff’s deputies, who work out of the courthouse, quickly detained Pea just north of the intersection before Seattle police officers arrived.
Pea was charged Dec. 9 with first-degree assault with a deadly weapon and remains jailed in lieu of $1 million bail, court records show. Eight days later, Pea underwent an evaluation to determine whether they could understand the legal proceedings and assist in their own defense, and a King County Superior Court judge in late December found the 42-year-old competent to stand trial. Pea has pleaded not guilty to the charge.
Marken and her family struggle to understand how such a violent encounter could unfold on a city street. Though random attacks aren’t common, they have happened before — and when questions about a defendant’s competency come into play, the court process can stretch on for years, sometimes without a satisfactory end.
Over two days in March 2022, for instance, Alexander Jay, now 44, is accused of pushing a woman down the stairs at the International District/Chinatown light rail station, stabbing another woman at a bus stop at 12th Avenue and Jackson Street in Little Saigon and fatally bludgeoning a man in the head with a length of rebar on Capitol Hill — all random attacks on strangers, according to court records.
Jay, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was sent to Western State Hospital three times for what’s called competency restoration treatment. After taking rounds of prescribed psychotropic medications, he was found competent to stand trial in November 2024, records show. Charged with first- and second-degree assault and premeditated first-degree murder, he is scheduled to stand trial next month.
King County prosecutors are seeing questions about a defendant’s competency being raised by defense attorneys “far more often than we did a decade ago,” said Casey McNerthney, a spokesperson for the prosecuting attorney’s office.
In 2018, competency was raised in roughly 400 adult felony cases, a number that spiked to around 650 cases just three years later, in 2021 — and numbers have remained high since then, he said. Last year, the number of adult felony cases where competency was raised climbed to 690.
“There are likely many factors leading to this, and collectively we need to continue to try to understand this increase,” McNerthney said.
But he said the numbers clearly show there is “need for additional state resources to address competency issues, and that’s something that all sides can agree on.”
A cycle of arrest and treatment
In the case against Pea, charging documents and other court and jail records provide a partial picture of a person with long-standing mental health issues who, before their Dec. 5 arrest, had been booked into jail seven times since February, spending a combined 81 days in custody for misdemeanor offenses.
Pea’s defense attorney in the first-degree assault case did not reply to an email sent to him.
Though charging papers refer to Pea as male, a police report filed in Seattle Municipal Court in April notes Pea is transgender and identifies as female. Psychologists who authored four competency reports — including the latest one in the first-degree assault case — refer to “Mx. Pea,” using the gender-neutral honorific in place of “Mr.” or “Ms.” Due to uncertainty about Pea’s gender identity, The Seattle Times is using they/them/their pronouns when referring to Pea.
Pea was born in American Samoa, raised by their grandparents and moved to Las Vegas in their late teens before coming to Seattle in 2009, according to self-reported information included in the competency reports. They last worked in 2010, have been on Social Security disability since 2013 due to mental health issues and have been homeless for the past two years, though at some point they were living in supportive and transitional housing.
One psychologist found in August 2024 that Pea underwent involuntary treatment 14 times in King County between 2020 and 2024 “for reasons including … danger to others, danger to property, danger to self, and grave disability,” court records show.
There is documentation of at least 372 outpatient visits over the past 15 years, with Pea receiving diagnoses including schizoaffective, bipolar and post traumatic stress disorders, the records say. They also have a history of methamphetamine use disorder.
That kind of cycle of jail stays and community interventions is known as “system churn,” and gaps in the system for people with serious mental illness to access quality care mean jails have become the country’s largest mental health facilities, said Kopelovich, the UW forensic psychologist.
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“Therapeutics can be provided in jails, but by their nature, they are not therapeutic environments,” where lights, noise, possible threats and difficulty sleeping can make symptoms so much worse, she said, speaking generally and not specifically about Pea’s case.
Meanwhile, the legal system is intended to balance public safety and individuals’ constitutional rights, with a lot of investment in things like pretrial diversion and mental health court over the past 20 years to connect people with care, Kopelovich said.
Kopelovich said it’s impossible to fully predict violence.
Paranoia or unfounded beliefs that someone is trying to harm or control you, coupled with substance use, acute stress, a history of violence and high levels of anger, are the clearest risk factors for violence, she said.
But, she said, “even clinicians who have been trained in forensic risk assessment will tell you that there are substantial limitations to the accuracy of our risk evaluations.”
Citing longitudinal research into the perennial question of a link between mental illness and violence, Kopelovich said when factors like substance use, trauma exposure and socioeconomic instability are controlled for, the risk is substantially lower.
“I think a lot of people would agree with me that more needs to be done about really diverting people from the legal system into mental health care when we see their symptoms are posing a risk to their health and safety or the health and safety of other people,” she said.
Since Pea was booked into jail last month, they have been prescribed a mood stabilizer, an antipsychotic medication and a medication often used to treat bipolar disorder but have occasionally refused to take the drugs for unknown reasons, according to the most recent competency report.
Under state law, someone is deemed competent to stand trial if they understand the legal proceedings and nature of the charges against them and can assist in their own defense.
Pea was able to identify first-degree assault as the charge filed against them and describe the roles and responsibilities of the judge, jury, prosecutor, defense and witnesses and distinguish between bench and jury trials, the report says. They didn’t express any concerns with their defense attorney or about receiving a fair trial.
While Pea’s symptoms have stabilized with psychotropic medications to the point that there are no longer concerns about their competency to proceed to trial, the psychologist’s evaluation includes a caveat:
“It should be noted that if Mx. Pea begins to refuse their psychotropic medication in a more significant manner, they may be at a greater risk for decompensation,” the psychologist wrote, citing the possibility of worsening symptoms. “If this occurs, re-evaluation of their legal capacities could become warranted.”
As the case moves through the legal system, Dyrikis and his father are focused on doing all they can to care for Marken as she recovers at home in their Queen Anne apartment.
Dyrikis, 39, arrived in Seattle from Medellín, Colombia, in late October to help care for his father, who underwent a planned eye surgery, and originally intended to stay for three months. He’s extending his visit to help his mom get to and from her doctor’s appointments and said, in a way, it was a good thing he was here when she was injured.
“I honestly wouldn’t know how to react if I got a call in Colombia and he’s like, ‘This happened to your mother.’ I would go crazy,” Dyrikis said.
He called his presence “a small, good thing” amid “a really bad thing.”
At an appointment at the end of December, they learned Marken’s nose is healing well, and she likely won’t need another surgery to fix it. She underwent an ultrasound on her damaged eye last week, and her doctor is considering next steps to ensure her quality of life.
“We’re very thankful to the people who helped her when it happened,” Dyrikis said of those who rushed to Marken’s aid and stayed with her until paramedics arrived.
The doctors and nurses at Harborview have also been unfailingly kind to Marken and her family, Dyrikis said. An anesthesiologist told Dyrikis and his older brother, “Hey, I’m going to treat her like she was my own mother,” and a nurse jokingly asked which of the brothers was their mom’s favorite, he said.
“Stuff like that, it really helps in dark moods,” he said. “It’s heavy, emotional, for us to go to these appointments and everything surrounding it, so if you get a kind soul who tries to change that state of mind, we really appreciate it.”
