Mom says troubled son should’ve been in jail
When her son got caught trying to rob a bank outside Japantown in San Francisco, Wendy Hutchens said she had one message for any member of law enforcement who would listen: Please lock him up.
Police arrested Franklin Fardella, 39, for the bungled robbery attempt on June 26, saying he walked into a bank at 1300 Post Street and handed a note demanding money to a teller. The teller foiled Fardella’s caper by pressing a silent alarm button.
“We thought they weren’t going to let him go,” said Hutchens, who saw the failed heist as a cry for help: Fardella had no getaway car, she said, and was clearly not bound to succeed. Her son had been unraveling for years, and she believes he suffers from a fentanyl addiction and undiagnosed mental health issues. She hoped that in jail he would at least be monitored and could perhaps receive drug treatment.
But San Francisco Superior Court judges released Fardella twice before his trial in December. He showed up for most of the proceedings and was in the courthouse on the morning of Dec. 12, anticipating a verdict. Yet, Fardella did not return that afternoon to hear a jury convict him of attempted second-degree robbery — a crime that carried up to three years in state prison.
A judge postponed his sentencing and issued a bench warrant for his arrest. Jail records show that as of Friday morning, he remained on the lam.
“I’m just worried sick,” Hutchens said in an interview shortly after the verdict, distressed that her son would have no place to go as a series of storms battered San Francisco.
Prosecutors agreed that Fardella should be held in jail before his trial, though they had slightly different reasoning: Whereas Hutchens focused on her son’s safety, employees of the district attorney’s office said he posed a threat to the public. They filed a detention motion on those grounds, but a judge rejected it, a spokesperson for the district attorney said. Instead, the judge set bail at $75,000 without prejudice — which meant the matter could be argued later.
“Releasing Mr. Fardella from jail to await trial was the right thing to do,” his public defender, Seth Meisels, said in a statement, adding that in this instance, jail amounted to a waste of public resources. Fardella had quietly waited in line at the bank before handing a rumpled note to the teller, never brandishing a weapon, Meisels said. No money changed hands, and he didn’t resist arrest.
“Jail is not a therapeutic environment, and during the pandemic, much of the already limited programming greatly diminished as isolation and lockdowns have increased,” Meisels added.
The court released Fardella to home detention on an electronic monitoring device on July 3, according to the district attorney’s office, though a spokesperson for the sheriff said he was not placed in the electronic monitoring program.
At his preliminary hearing two weeks later, a judge ruled to deny the prosecution’s motion to detain Fardella without bail.
After Fardella failed to appear for another court date on July 31, a judge issued a bench warrant. Police arrested him and he was re-arraigned on Aug. 22. A judge released him the next day over the district attorney’s objections. He was not enrolled in electronic monitoring, the sheriff ’s spokesperson said.
Fardella’s case went to trial in December, just as Hutchens was moving from her home in the Outer Sunset to a new place near Auburn (Placer County). She attended one of her son’s hearings and said a court employee called her the next day, asking whether she could take him into her home. She declined, referring the employee to Fardella’s father.
“We both said, ‘Please don’t let him go,’ ” Hutchens recalled.
In the past, Fardella has arrived at her doorstep beaten up or talking about invisible people, Hutchens said, noting that she has tried to help, sometimes letting him sleep on the couch or providing cellphones that seemed to vanish. She fears her son could be a danger to himself or others and said she can no longer care for him or treat his health problems.
In the months leading up to the trial, court officials connected Fardella to a case manager and offered him services, all of which are voluntary. His mother said she had the impression that the charges against him would be dropped and that he would be referred to a treatment program. Once the trial got underway, Hutchens said, she felt blindsided and misled.
Since the verdict, Hutchens said she has heard from her son intermittently. He doesn’t have a phone, she said, so mutual friends have called her whenever he turned up. On Monday, someone handed Fardella the phone and he spoke to Hutchens for about three minutes.
“He was wet and cold and didn’t want to talk much,” she said in an interview hours later.
She emphasized that her son is not violent and said she would love to see him in some type of addiction treatment or mental health facility, but that he won’t seek those services on his own.
Jail is at least preferable to letting a desperate, vulnerable person wander through the city, she said, adding that her son’s recent flight “shows there’s some accountability falling apart.”