Release photo of Luis Barreto Hassan
When he was pushed in a wheelchair into a Riverside Superior Court hearing Monday, Aug. 21, convicted ex-cop Luis Barreto Hassan received little sympathy from the horrified family of his former girlfriend Kristina Lazzarini, who he murdered in 1990.
Hassan, now 78, released from prison Aug. 16 after serving 26 years of a 30 years-to-life prison sentence, was let go under the auspices of AB 650, California’s “compassionate release” law. Enacted last year, the law was intended to expedite cases of prisoners who are practically on their deathbeds to spend their remaining months in the comfort of family and friends.
The Lazzarini family and members of the law enforcement community see the law as flawed, allowing Hassan to have extensive freedom in Beaumont.
Kristina’s older brother by three years, Steve Lazzarini, said in an interview, “Her life was cut short by this piece of crap. Now he’s been let loose scot-free because of a badly flawed law” since a general practitioner within the prison system declared Hassan had a year left to live due to a terminal diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis.
Victims of the disease can live between three to five years based on their age, lifestyle and other factors, according to the American Lung Association.
“The community needs to know: a general practitioner was able to declare this without having to provide oncological proof or specialty reports,” said Lazzarini.
According to investigator Luis Bolanos of Riverside-based Get Bit Investigations, a retired Riverside County sheriff who has closely followed the case, “The prosecutor’s office wanted to have their own medical experts evaluate Mr. Hassan, but the court wouldn’t allow it.”
“To get a victim’s impact statement all over again” after 30 years “in a matter of days, when they’re still absorbing the news that he’s being released, is just cruel,” Bolanos said.
“He was conveniently pushed in a wheelchair into court, a façade to continue to gain sympathy from the court. He can still feed himself and go to the bathroom by himself. He can still type and manipulate a handgun. It doesn’t make any sense that this monster can walk all over the community again.”
A convicted criminal now loose
Luis Hassan was a former police officer, first with Bell Gardens Police Department, from which he was terminated after falsifying information in order to collect unemployment benefits; followed by a stint with the Cathedral City Police Department.
At the time of the murder, he was working for the Los Angeles City Housing Authority Police Department.
He had been dating Kristina Lazzarini, though it appears she no longer wanted to continue the relationship.
After visiting her parents’ home looking for her on that fateful day of Dec. 2, 1990, and apparently forgetting that it was Lazzarini’s 27th birthday, Hassan then drove to his home and pleaded with for her to change her mind, according to Lazzarini’s friends and family.
When she refused, he shot her in the head and placed the gun in her hand to try and make it appear as though she committed suicide.
Lazzarini’s mother Marilyn commissioned an analysis by the Loss Angeles office of Arcadia-based firm Pro Tech Investigations into what she suspected was a mishandling of the case by Cathedral City Police Department under then Chief Ron Johnson.
According to investigator James W. Walker’s report, “On the night of the crime Hassan was placed in the custody of his friend and investment partner, Lt. Holcomb,” who was “off duty but was called in to assist in the investigation. Holcomb transported Hassan to the police station to conduct a gunpowder residue test on Hassan. During a conversation at the station, another officer overheard Hassan comment to Holcomb something to the effect, ‘I must have treated her pretty bad if she blew her brains out.’ This is particularly important since Hassan claimed to have not been inside the residence, nor witnessed the crime scene, nor had been told how the victim died. This statement was later reported by the witnessing officer, but never reported by Lt. Holcomb.”
According to the report, when a homicide investigator discovered automatic weapons and nude photographs of an underaged girl who was serving as an Explorer with the department, investigators were told that those “items were not evidence of the homicide and ordered they not be seized.”
The firm’s investigation included an interview with the minor, who admitted that she and Hassan had consensual sex.
During his time with Cathedral City Police Department, Hassan battered and assaulted a woman while he was on duty, an incident that was witnessed by another officer and a Cathedral City firefighter.
In a separate incident he reportedly applied a chokehold to a 16-year-old boy while he was on duty.
Because of his misconduct for that department, Hassan was allowed to resign from Cathedral City Police Department in lieu of termination, and Chief Johnson issued him a six-month permit to carry a concealed weapon, according to Walker’s report.
Johnson gave Hassan positive reviews to the Los Angeles City Housing Authority Police Department when he applied for his position there, and did not bring up Hassan’s misconduct, according to the report.
Amanda Lane-Moore, a close friend of the Lazzarini family, started a petition drive in an attempt to prevent Hassan from being released.
“He is not a stable person. If someone pisses him off at the grocery store,” he could become belligerent, she said in an interview. “He can drive, he can do what he wants. With his record of how he was as an officer, he didn’t follow the law then. What makes anyone think he’ll follow the law now?”
Further, she points out that while registered sex offenders cannot live within .5 miles of a school, and Hassan, a convicted murderer, will be living .3 miles away from Three Rings Ranch on Claibourne Avenue.
Photo courtesy Luis Bolanos
Guns seized from Luis Hassan’s home at the time of his arrest.
“The Lazzarini family had to bury their daughter, their sister, and they had to wait seven years for justice, and justice came,” the court told Hassan at his sentencing, according to a court transcript. “The victim was particularly vulnerable. The defendant took advantage of a position of trust, and the manner in which the gun was used was cold, calculated and a vicious act, and nothing less than that. It was nothing less than a cold-blooded execution, because a young woman in the prime of her life decided she didn’t want him as part of her life, and he killed her for it.”
The transcript records Hassan declaring that he maintains innocence. The transcript notes: “Court: Mr. Hassan, you constantly say you’re not guilty,” with a response from “The defendant: Correct.”
He was sentenced for five years for the use of the gun, and an additional 25 years to life and a fine of $10,000 in restitution, as well as $10,000 in fines.
Steve Lazzarini told the Record Gazette that he was not aware of any restitution given to his family.
The transcript states, “What you did that night … what 12 jurors believe you did that night, was the destruction of a human being. It was the destruction of the potential that she had and it took a loved one away from many people who cared very deeply about her.”
She was buried in Cathedral City.
Finding compassion in compassionate release
According to the Prison Law Office in San Quentin, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s regulations, compassionate release is intended to allow a court to recall the sentence “of someone with a fatal illness and resentence them to a lower term so they can spend the last few months of their life in the community,” referring to individuals within the prison system who “have very serious medical conditions” who have less than six months to live, or are medically paroled due to permanent incapacitation.
Based on data managed by Washington, D.C.-based Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a nonprofit that advocates for prison reform, every state with the exception of Iowa has some form of early compassionate release program.
As of October 2022, it gives California a D- rating (34 states received an F, and four states were given at least an A) when it comes to implementing a compassionate release program.
FAMM gave California a C- for Recall of Sentence implementation; C for Medical Parole; and an F for Elderly Parole.
Based on a report by Bolts Magazine, which focuses on political change, the law was intended to ease the bureaucratic mess that families of prisoners have to navigate in order to qualify them for compassionate release.
Leading up to the law that took effect Jan. 1, between January 2015 and April 2021, according to an analysis by FAMM, 304 people sought compassionate release in California; 290 were found medically eligible, but just 53 were released in time to pass away at home, with 91 dying while waiting in prison.
In February 78-year-old former Westminster attorney Thomas Maniscalco, founder of the Hessian Motorcycle Club, was released to his daughter in San Jose under the law after twice being denied parole and after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He had been serving 46 years to life for the second-degree shooting deaths of three people (which also involved the rape of one victim, the daughter of a Los Alamitos police officer) on Memorial Day in 1980.
The Orange County District attorney’s Office claimed that the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not inform families of the victims about the pending hearings and release.
Also in February, the federal Bureau of Prisons rejected an early release on humanitarian grounds of 43-year-old Aimee Chavira, who claimed that while serving time at the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin near Oakland she was sexually abused by five former prision employees, including the warden.
She was serving time on a drug charge, and is among a “handful of the women at Dublin” who “have applied for compassionate release,” according to a report by the New York Times.
That publication pointed out that “doing so represents a shock to an institution more focused on locking up inmates than letting them go,” since the “ultimate arbiters have been reluctant to support early release unless an inmate is ill, dying or incapacitated by age.”
At the time of the story by the Times, Chavira was being held at a federal prison in Arizona and is scheduled for release in 2026.
Mary O’Keefe, arraigned in Madera County for the Dec. 17, 2016 death of her elderly neighbor Bonnie Hale, who “died of asphyxiation as a result of blunt force trauma to the throat” by a cleaning tool, was serving 13 years and four months for voluntary manslaughter.
KMPH-Fox26 News reported that O’Keefe was released on March 10 under the compassionate release law, though it did not specify what her medical condition may have been; she died a few days later.
Luke Scarmazzo, who served 14 of a 22-year sentence in federal prison for operating a state-legal nonprofit medical cannabis dispensary in Modesto, had been incarcerated at the Yazoo City, Miss.-based federal correction institution in Yazoo City.
Medical marijuana had been legal in California since 1996, and voters approved marijuana for personal use by adults in 2016, but Scarmazzo, who ran the dispensary with co-founder Ricardo Montes (who was pardoned and released by President Obama in 2017), was arrested on 18 federal counts, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to manufacture, distribute and possess marijuana plants, and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, among others.
Forbes reported that Scarmazzo was “the last federal prisoner locked up for a California medical marijuana charge.”
He had petitioned President Obama for commutation in 2017 but his petition was denied, and denied again by President Trump in 2021.
District Court Judge Dale Drozd wrote in his decision, “When considering the unique confluence of … changes in the legal landscape with respect to federal enforcement of laws relating to distribution of marijuana in California; the significant disparity in the sentence actually served by co-defendant Montes and the 14-plus years already served in prison by defendant Scarmazzo; defendant’s good behavior, meaningful employment, volunteer work, pursuit of educational opportunities during his imprisonment; solid release plans including job offers and family support; the lack of danger posed to the community were he to be released” and the extenuating health circumstances of his surviving family members, compelled Dozd to order Scarmazzo’s compassionate release.
He finally won his compassionate release case in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, and was released Feb. 3.
Compassion for Hassan, but not the Lazzarinis
When it comes to Luis Hassan, compassion has come from the court that approved his release without permitting prosecutors to have specialists determine whether or not he is truly at death’s door.
Then there’s the compassion of Army National Guard veteran and former Cathedral City police officer Richard Mosely, who told the court at Monday’s hearing that he was indebted to Hassan, going back to the days when Hassan mentored him while he was an Explorer during Hassan’s employment at the department.
Photo via healveterans.com
Richard Mosely
In a phone interview, Mosely said, “First and foremost, the Bible in Mathew 25:31-35 talks about Jesus saying visit the prisoners and share the word. From the early part of my career, I was told, ‘Don’t be friends with him,’ that he would ruin my career, and that was before he was convicted,” Mosely said. He was “warned I’d never be hired as a police officer.”
Mosely insists that Hassan “took me in, as a mentor and a guide, and regardless of the conviction, he was still human and someone I looked up to. I never said anything about guilt or innocence, but remained a pen pal.”
Throughout his career, Mosely was told by supervisors that “they,” being all criminals, “are dirtbags, and that we are better than them, and as cops we should not associate with them. I felt otherwise throughout my career. They’re still humans, they’re still people. That went against police mentality.”
Mosely would go on to work for the Cathedral City Police Department and in law enforcement for 30 years, helping run a youth program and receiving accolades for his service during his tenure, he said.
“About the time I left, because he was convicted, things became horrible for me; I was still friends,” Mosely said. “The guy’s in a wheelchair and can barely breathe, he’s not a danger to anybody.”
Mosely said, “I’m the one who contacted Beaumont Police Department. They didn’t even know about his release. I’m the one who asked for extra patrols,” though the Police Department disputes his claim.
Spokeswoman Marcedes Cashmere said the department learned about the release through a story that was sent to their chief.
It’s his home in Beaumont where Hassan will live out his remaining days, and Mosely had to give up his registered weapons as part of the deal.
“It feels like the compassionate release law sometimes gives criminals more rights than you and I have,” Steve Lazzarini told the Record Gazette. “He’s not on parole and no one is monitoring him, there’s no ankle monitor. He has to check in with a probation officer once a month, and has been ordered not to leave the state or the country.”
Lazzarini not only lost his sister, but his younger brother John, who discovered Kristina Lazzarini’s body. John committed suicide after dealing with the trauma, and then their mother also eventually took her own life, as well.
The anguish initially languished for seven years, during which time Hassan was initially charged — and charges were dropped — before he was put on trial in 1997.
His parole was denied in 2015 and 2019.
Family friend Amanda Moore started a petition urging “Justice for the Victims: Keep a Convicted Murderer Behind Bars!”
As of Aug. 23 there were 2,611 signatures on a vain attempt to keep Hassan in prison.
“This petition aims to shed light on the ‘Compassionate release program’ for people who commit heinous crimes,” the petition pleads. “We firmly believe that releasing Luis Barreto Hassan would be an injustice to the victims and their families, jeopardize public safety and undermine the integrity of our judicial system.”
Riverside County District attorney Mike Hestrin, president of the California District Attorneys Association, which was one of the few organizations to publicly oppose AB 960, said in a statement, “Compassion should never come at the cost of public safety. Our office stands in firm opposition to California’s compassionate release bill” that “allows inmates convicted of violent crimes such as murder to be released because they are terminally ill. Although well-intended, this law lacks critical safeguards to ensure the inmate does not reoffend.
“Unfortunately we are experiencing this firsthand in Riverside County. The opposition to Hassan’s release by our office underscores a vital point: the danger to society remains. There is no evidence on the record that indicates his death will be anytime soon. The gravity of his past offense further magnifies our concerns.”
Hestrin’s office also expressed concern over the lack of oversight for his release, or accountability.
“Where is the compassion for the victim’s family members, knowing the convicted inmate is now free for the remainder of his life?” Hestrin’s office stated.
On Friday, Aug. 18, Beaumont Police Department issued a community advisory on social media, assuring residents that the police department “will continue to closely monitor the situation,” and declared that the department “is aware and dismayed by the release of Luis Hassan into the community under the Compassionate Release Act … Hassan’s history and circumstances have raised concern among our law enforcement officers and the community at-large. While we acknowledge the intentions of the act and may disagree with the release of this individual into our community, our commitment remains steadfast in maintaining a secure environment for all residents of Beaumont.”
Stan Henry, who handled Hassan’s investigation and would go on to become Cathedral City’s police chief from 1995 to 2010 and now runs his own consulting firm, issued a memo to Riverside Court Judge Helios Hernandez that declared, “I was a police officer for over 30 years and the chief of police in Cathedral City for 15 years. I was involved in the investigation of the murder of Kristina Lazzarini, which was a brutal murder of a young innocent woman by Mr. Hassan. I was on the scene of the crime and talked with Mr. Hassan, who didn’t at that time, and has never, taken responsibility for this crime, and has never shown any remorse for Kristina’s death. Mr. Hassan is still a danger to society and is one of the persons I would still be fearful of if released to our community.”
Now residents just blocks away from an elementary school will be slightly on edge, and Beaumont Police Department’s post alerting citizens of Hassan’s release unleashed interactions on their Facebook page.
Remembering Kristina
Courtesy photo
A photo of Kristina Lazzarini, as used to promote an online petition “Justice for the Victims: Keep a Convicted Murderer Behind Bars!”
Steve Lazzarini, a retired builder who had been preparing plans to build a home for his sister, told the Record Gazette that, every time there is a hearing, “I have to relive all the files and the six years it took to put him in prison, and will have to do so again” for a hearing slated for Dec. 11, when the court is expected to receive updates on Hassan’s welfare.
His sister was cooking the night Hassan came and murdered her on her 27th birthday.
“She was one of the most unbelievingly caring persons. She loved animals and picked up every stray,” Lazzarini recalled. “She was successful in the mortgage business and helped a lot of those former officers” finance homes. “She loved helping everyone, and had so much to look forward to, and unfortunately we lost not only our sister and our parents their daughter, but my mother and brother both lost their lives dealing with this clown. I never want another family to ever have to go through something like this again, looking over our shoulder to avoid him chasing us down so he can do something to keep his reputation clean, and then to live through all the hearings. How compassionate is that to the victim’s families? I can’t bring my sister back, but I can help others avoid going through something like that.”
He has declared it to be his life’s mission.
Staff Writer David James Heiss may be reached at dheiss@recordgazette.net.
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