NORTH HOLLYWOOD – Even in a house of God, Marie Sabe wasn’t safe.It was a Monday, just a regular day at work. She was wandering peacefully back to her office when Bobby Miranda surprised her.
She was tall and pretty; an earthy, healthy blonde working for a Christian record label renting space at First Assembly Church of God.
He was a convicted murderer, robber and rapist, seeking refuge at the church after earning parole a little more than a year earlier.
She knew the big man with the tattoo on his face, and had even loaned him money a few weeks earlier. He flashed the cash, then pushed her into his room.
“I want to show you something,” he growled, according to court testimony. “Be quiet.”
He produced a dirty, 4-inch kitchen knife. Over and over, he plunged it into her chest.
“I screamed for help,” Sabe later testified. “I screamed my boss’s name and I was beaten and stabbed and slashed practically to death.”
It’s been a year since the savage attack. Sabe is now dead, Miranda is in prison and Sabe’s family has filed a civil suit for negligence against the church and its pastors for failing to notify her that there was a killer living on the grounds.
Although she lost half her blood and the knife punctured her lung, Sabe’s attack on Jan. 22, 2007, attracted little attention at the time. The Los Angeles Police Department didn’t issue a press release, and the District Attorney’s Office didn’t herald Miranda’s arrest and prosecution on an attempted murder charge.
“It’s the ultimate story of, `No good deed goes unpunished,”‘ said Ron Berman, her attorney. “She lends him $11, he stabs her 12 times.”
Miranda, 52, took a plea deal on the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon the day before his criminal trial was set to begin last October. With two previous strikes against him, he’s now in Wasco State Prison and could spend the rest of his life locked up.
But Sabe could only enjoy a small feeling of justice with Miranda’s sentence. After 36 years of a healthy lifestyle, she’d contracted skin cancer. Her family believes her immune system, compromised after the nearly fatal stabbing, shut down. She died Oct. 24.
In November, her family sued the church and its pastors, accusing them of negligence for not informing Sabe and others who worked nearby that there was a convicted sex offender in their midst.
The lawsuit’s still in the early stages, but Sabe’s relatives hope it will help commemorate her life and prevent similar deaths.
“She was a light and he put it out,” said Deborah Rowden, Sabe’s mother. “Since January of last year, she’s been swept under a rug. She deserves better than that.”
The church did not respond to several requests for comment through its lawyer, Paul deLorimier. Given religious organizations’ history of helping ex-cons get back on their feet, however, the case presents an interesting legal question.
“You could say, `We have a charitable institution and if we impose these restrictions, they won’t provide these services and these people will be out on the street,”‘ said Greg Keating, a University of Southern California law professor.
“The counterargument is, `Why is the cost on the woman? Why does she have to be killed?”‘
In a January case with some similarity, a jury awarded $12million to the family of Sharon Santos, allegedly killed by the maintenance man at her Burbank apartment building.
The jury found that the owner and manager, Villa Apartments L.P. and Francis Property Management Inc., should have screened the man’s prior criminal background before hiring him and giving him access to apartments.
But Sabe’s stabbing was different, her family’s lawyers noted, because the church already knew Miranda had an extensive history of serious violence.
Miranda’s criminal career began as a teenager with a brutal shotgun murder in 1975, said Bill McCord, who’s also representing the family.
He eventually was paroled, and in 1983 broke into someone’s home and raped a girl who was younger than 14, according to prison records and the state’s Megan’s Law database of sex offenders.
A judge sentenced him to 43 years in prison, but he was paroled a second time in December 2005.
“There’s a conflict of laudable objectives,” McCord said. “You can’t fault the folks at the church for wanting to rehabilitate and save a soul. On the other hand, they have a responsibility to innocents in the zone of harm: they have to make sure they’re not injured.”
As her health slipped away, Sabe took a unique perspective. While she suffered and felt her body wither, she told her fiance, Carl Barnard, that she was glad Miranda picked her instead of a parishioner or one of the kids running around the church grounds.
“Thank God it was me,” Barnard remembered her saying. “If he’d stabbed one of those little girls, she’d have died.”
