A female gang member spent less than four years incarcerated for a double murder due to Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón’s policies.
She has now been charged with another killing just months after her release.
In 2019, East Coast Crips member Shanice Dyer shot dead expectant father Alfredo Carrera and his rocket scientist friend Jose Flores, who had just got a job at NASA.
Dyer, 22, was charged alongside two others last week with the murder of Joshua Streeter, 21, in Pomona, California. He was shot in the back at a swap meet and die.
Former prosecutors and victims’ advocates told DailyMail.com that Streeter’s murder never would have happened if not for the controversial policies of LA DA Gascón.
‘Dyer, who should have been incarcerated for life, was free—thanks to Gascón’s policies—and now another family is grieving the loss of their loved one,’ the LA Association of Deputy District Attorneys said in a statement.
The news comes as the unpopular LA DA and former San Francisco top prosecutor known for his liberal justice reforms, faces daunting polls of 20 percent versus his opponent Nathan Hochman’s 45 percent in the upcoming November election.
Dyer, whose street name is Infant Chyna, was 17 when she committed the 2019 murders.
Older teens charged with the most severe crimes are often tried in adult court. But when Gascón became DA in 2020, he canceled all such ‘juvenile transfers’ and all ‘enhancements’ to charges for gang and gun involvement.
The decision – condemned by victims and prosecutors’ groups – meant Dyer was eligible for release after just three and a half years in a juvenile institution.
Retired LA prosecutor Kathleen Cady, who represented Carrera and Flores’ families pro bono, told DailyMail.com that Dyer was sent back to juvenile hall twice due to violating her temporary release restrictions, before she was eventually let out permanently.
‘She would have had an education coach, a mental health person, wraparound services, extra tutoring,’ said Cady. ‘She’s being given all of those services to try to help her rehabilitate. And obviously in this case that was a dismal failure.
‘LA County’s juvenile justice system is in shambles. It would be one thing if there were actually adequate resources to provide, but in LA County, there are not.
‘She never should have been left in the juvenile system, she should have been transferred up to the adult court.
‘Had that happened, she would still be in custody, and this new person who was murdered would be alive today.’
According to Pomona Police Department, Dyer and two other East Coast Crips gunned down 21-year-old Streeter in a parking lot at the Indian Hill Mall Indoor Swap Meet in Pomona on June 7 this year.
Dyer is being held without bail. Her next hearing, this time in Pomona’s adult criminal court, is scheduled November 1 according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.
Cady filed a writ on behalf of the victims’ families in 2021 to the California Court of Appeal to try to stop Gascón canceling Dyer’s transfer to adult criminal court. But the judge sided with the DA.
The filings included desperate pleas from the bereaved Carrera and Flores families to keep Dyer from being eligible for release after just a couple of years.
‘We want to make it known that it is upsetting that we have to beg for justice,’ Carrera’s sister Alondra Palacio said in a January 2021 letter written on behalf of the two families.
‘George Gascón’s new policies have failed Alfredo and Jose and so many others, but we will not rest until we receive proper justice.
‘This was simply a cold, senseless hate crime and for what? My brother never got a chance to hold his baby boy (born September 30th, 2019) and Jose Flores Velazquez never got a chance to put his PhD on his parent’s wall. When will Shanice Dyer and the others pay? This only fuels the younger generations to get away with murder.
‘Alfredo and Jose also grew up in a poor and dangerous area of Los Angeles and you did not see them killing anyone.
‘We feel the justice system has deemphasized the seriousness of crimes by allowing Dyer to only serve a short sentence and it is important to point out that she did not commit this crime because her brain is undeveloped, but rather because she carries hate in her soul.’
Palacio gave a fateful warning in her letter, three years ahead of Dyer’s third alleged gang-related murder.
‘The time Dyer will spend in juvenile hall will not make her remorseful because the whole reason behind her actions was to advance within her gang and gain respect from her gang,’ the bereaved sister wrote.
The 2019 shooting was prompted by a killing by rival gang Florencia 13 on the East Coast Crips’ ‘territory’.
Dyer, another juvenile Damien Ellis, and adult Jonathan Charles Johnson, drove a blue Nissan Maxima into a neighborhood claimed by Florencia 13, and indiscriminately shot at people on the street, prosecutors’ court filings said.
Flores had just shown up to Carrera’s baby shower. Carrera’s girlfriend watched her baby daddy and his best friend gunned down outside their home.
The three Crips then drove down the street and shot at another father Joel Rosas, who ‘used his own body to shield his infant daughter’ and was hit in the back by a bullet, but survived.
In court, Dyer admitted to committing the murders.
‘My son was an exemplary man,’ wrote Flores’ mother Maria Velazquez in a December 2019 letter to the judge in Dyer’s case.
‘Those responsible left us with an empty void in our hearts and with an irreplaceable loss.
‘He was extremely family oriented and would make the effort to visit us every weekend once he moved to Irvine for school.
‘I still wait for his arrival on the weekends and once I realize he won’t ever be returning I sink into my despair.
‘The people responsible for his and Alfredo Carreras’ death never imagined or even considered the amount of pain they could cause. This girl who is going to court on the same day of my son’s 25th birthday wanted to show her friends how tough she was.
‘And today I ask her one thing, I need her to show me how to live without my son.’
Shawn Randolph, a 30-year veteran deputy district attorney, was head of the DA’s juvenile division when Gascón took over in December 2020.
Randolph told DailyMail.com that sent her new boss documents outlining the facts of each of the roughly 90 juvenile cases of murders, attempted murders and violent sexual assaults by 16 or 17-year-olds that were planned to be moved to adult court but would now stay in the juvenile system due to the new DA’s policy.
Those cases would have included Dyer’s double murder.
But Randolph said her concerns fell on deaf ears.
‘I put him on notice of all the cases that were pending, and what the facts of each case were. On all of those cases, the recommendation of the prosecutors, and me, was for them to go to adult court.
‘I don’t believe he cared enough about these cases to even read about them,’ the senior prosecutor told DailyMail.com.
‘They were running the largest prosecutor’s office in the country. He had the case summaries. He either read them and put his ideology before public safety, or he didn’t even read them.
‘Either way, he failed.’
Randolph said she was moved to a role in the parole division after complaining about Gascón’s policy.
She sued Gascón’s office for retaliation and was awarded $1.5 million in March 2023.
Gascón was forced to walk back his policy against juvenile transfers after a public outcry over pedophile and murderer Hannah Tubbs, a trans woman whom Gascón prosecuted as a child at the age of 26 after molesting a girl in a restaurant bathroom when Tubbs was a 17-year-old male in 2014.
Tubbs later pleaded no contest to beating friend Michael Clark to death with a rock in April 2019.
Randolph said allowing murderers to be prosecuted in juvenile court where they often are released after two to three years, puts LA residents at risk.
‘When these individuals are released in two to three years after committing murder, and they commit murder again, this kind of outcome is predictable and preventable,’ the senior prosecutor told DailyMail.com.
‘It’s devastating to victims and their families, and it is disproportionate to the crimes. To have someone murder two people or violently sexually assault a 10-year-old girl, and be incapacitated for such a short amount of time, is extremely dangerous for public safety.’
The DA’s office told DailyMail.com that Dyer only ticked one of five boxes that qualify juvenile cases for transfer to adult court.
‘Our heart breaks for the victim and his family. This is an unimaginable tragedy,’ a spokeswoman for the DA’s office said. ‘However, it is very unlikely that Ms. Dyer would have been transferred under any administration.’
The spokeswoman played down Dyer’s individual culpability at the time of the 2019 shooting, saying she was ‘under the influence of adult men and acted at their direction which indicates that she did not exhibit a high degree of criminal sophistication.’
They also cited her ‘lack of any serious criminal history at the time’ and the ‘amount of time and opportunity that remained at that time to rehabilitate her in the juvenile system’.
After Gascón’s office was sued over his policies violating victims’ rights, the DA set up a committee to review juvenile transfers in March 2022.
The Juvenile Alternative Charging Evaluation Committee has approved prosecutors to request transfers in 23 cases. Of those, five have been heard in court, one has been granted and four denied, the DA’s office said.