RICKY DEAN SPAHN
Charge: Residential burglary, three counts
Value of stolen goods: $5151.96

Sean and Kimberly Riley were visiting friends on Hawthorne Street in Eureka 
that afternoon. They were with their hosts in the back yard when a 9-year-old 
neighbor girl ran into the yard and told them she had seen a man go into the 
hosts' house and come back out the front door with a purse under his arm. The 
purse was Kimberly Riley's. The man ran into a nearby alley. The police were 
called and responded quickly.

The first officer to arrive talked to 9-year-old Jessica and learned from her 
that the man she saw run out of the house with the purse stayed at a white 
house with red trim on Union Street, which intersected Hawthorne. She knew this
because she had seen the man come and go from the house several times recently.
The sergeant on duty drove to that house on Union Street, talked to the owner 
and described the suspect. The homeowner quickly identified him as Ricky Spahn.
He said Spahn often came to the house to visit his daughter, Stacy, who was 
Spahn's younger brother's girlfriend.

The officer cruised the neighborhood, and a couple of blocks away, at 2153 Pine
Street, he observed Spahn helping another man repair an automobile. Spahn was 
detained without incident. The crime occurred at 12:45 p.m. Spahn was arrested 
45 minutes later. The purse contained several credit cards, a wristwatch valued
at $16.96, a brown leather wallet valued at $5, and $55 in cash.

When blond-haired, blue-eyed, 30-year-old Ricky Spahn was booked into the 
Humboldt County jail at 6:30 p.m. on July 28, he had 49 cents in his pocket.
Despite his past prison commitments, Spahn is not the stereotypical, hard-nosed
ex-con. He is eager to please, eager to admit all of his wrongdoing and even 
eager to confess to crimes that the police did not know had occurred. In fact, 
one such unreported crime is count one of the "three strikes" prosecution he is
currently facing.

Shortly after his arrest, he was interrogated by a Eureka Police Department 
detective who says he has known Spahn since he was 7 or 8 years old. Later in 
the day, Spahn and he drove around identifying other homes that he had 
burglarized. Spahn pointed out a total of 10 homes he said he had entered 
within the past few weeks. He told the detectives that he got about $50 from 
one house, less than $20 each from two others, but police later said that two 
rings valued at $5000 were also missing. Amazingly, Spahn reported that he took
nothing from the other seven houses. 

Spahn is what police call a "green thumb burglar." He waits until he sees 
someone outside in the garden, watering the lawn or gardening, then dashes in 
and looks only for a purse or wallet, snatches it and runs quickly back out 
again. The detective's report states: "He would then take the purse of wallet 
and go to a nearby alley to take out the money. He would then throw the purse 
or wallet down and walk away. We asked him about the jewelry in some of these 
purses and he told us he never took any as he didn't know if any of it was real
or not."

Is this criminal for real?  Or is he the comic character that a local monthly 
newspaper described him as in the cover story of its October issue: "Local 
police enjoy a good laugh and Ricky Spahn has certainly provided one. He'll be 
remembered as the burglar who rummaged through a vehicle, found a Polaroid 
camera and took his own mug shot. Then he fled, leaving behind both camera, and
incriminating photograph. ... He once tried to get a stolen television set home
by wheeling it down the street in a shopping cart -- in broad daylight." 
Actually, Spahn says, it was a baby carriage, not a shopping cart.
The interviewer asked Spahn why he did this -- does he drink? "No, I don't," he
replied forcefully. "Never touch the stuff." Then why keep pulling these 
burglaries? "I needed the money for supplies." Supplies? "Pot," he says with a 
sheepish grin. "You know, marijuana." Why did you want to get the marijuana? he
was asked. "Because it makes my headaches better. You know, my spells."

Spahn's mother had a great deal to say about her son and his "spells." Ima Jean
Spahn moved recently to Redding with Ricky's younger brother, Zach. She was 
still living in Eureka when Ricky was released from prison in November 1993, 
and he lived at home from then until his arrest in July 1994.  
"Ricky is a good son," his mother reports, "except for stealing things like he 
does. But when he was at home, he would give me $250 each month out of his 
disability for the rent, and he always bought his own food." Spahn's father and
mother are separated.

Spahn is one of eight children and the only one with a prolonged criminal 
history -- and that has not a little to do with a tragic accident in 1966, when
Mrs. Spahn was driving outside Eureka on Highway 101. The five oldest children 
were with her in the car, and she was pregnant. She lost control of the car, 
which rolled over three times before coming to a stop. Miraculously, the only 
injury was to Ricky, who suffered a terrible blow to the left side of his 
forehead. "He had his first spell two weeks later," Mrs. Spahn recalls, "and 
ever since then it has been nothing but pain and sorrow for that poor boy. Pain
and sorrow and bad times."

Ricky was 2 years old at the time. For the next six years he spent months at a 
time in Stanford University Hospital and the University of California Medical 
Center in San Francisco. He was suffering from seizures, sometimes up to 30 or 
35 of them each day. He also developed meningitis. The doctors tried a myriad 
of medications in an attempt to control the constant seizures, but nothing 
seemed to work.

"You know," Mrs. Spahn tells the interviewer, "it was like Ricky never really 
had a childhood. It was always in and out, down south and back home. He never 
got the kind of chance or schooling that other kids get. He was brave, though, 
and was a sweet child even with all those problems and those spells all the 
time."

Finally, the doctors exhausted their pharmaceutical solutions to Spahn's 
seizures, and they decided to try a surgical procedure. It was a very chancy 
operation, and the results were not too predictable. But the doctors thought 
that if they went in and took out part of the frontal lobe of the brain, and 
part of the temporal lobe, it was their best hope for mitigating or eliminating
the seizures. They were grievously wrong.

"As I recall it, by the time the stitches came out and his hair grew back, you 
could tell it had done something to the boy," his mother remembers. "I mean, 
something besides making him a bit slow, which I suppose you might expect from 
that kind of an operation. After all, they take out that much of what there is,
it has got to slow you down some." 

The worst of it, however, was not the physical effects themselves. The surgical
exorcism was covered with a steel plate, but it still left a sizable, and very 
noticeable, dent in his forehead. And children can be terribly cruel and 
insensitive.

"I can't remember how many times his teachers and I talked about what could be 
done," Mrs. Spahn recounts as she speaks of how the other grade schoolers would
tease Ricky, both for the "hole in his head" and about how "slow" he was. "The 
best they could do was speak to the other children, but ... well, kids are 
kids, and they just kept making Ricky's life hell. The staff, I suppose they 
did the best they could. And within a year or so, I got to admit, he was hard 
to keep an eye on."

Spahn's last year of formal schooling was in seventh grade. He says he reads at
about the second-grade level. When asked why he quit, he shook his head and 
said, "They wasn't doing me no good. They wouldn't learn me anything, so I 
figured why should I bother to go." His mother did not protest the decision too
vigorously. 

"I tell you, right back then I think they cut out the wrong part or something,"
she says with obvious feeling in her voice, "because really, as soon as he 
could get up and run around again you could tell he was a different little boy.
Within a year, by the time he was 9 or 10, he started getting into trouble. 
First it was that he just wouldn't listen. Then he was so hyper, you know? 
Never could sit still. Never could just sit down and be quiet."

And it got to where he just wouldn't listen ... he wouldn't sass me, but he 
just did his thing." 

She also confirms that she didn't stop him when he first started smoking 
marijuana in the house. "He said that it made the pain from the spells better,"
she explained, "and at first it was just a couple a day by himself. But then 
other kids would come around and ask him for some, and being the kind of boy 
that he is, he would always share with them." She pauses for a few seconds. 
"Then he didn't have any money to get more for himself," she continues, "and 
that's when he started going into people's houses."

Dr. Kurt Osborne is the neurosurgeon who, along with his partner, Dr. John 
Gambin, has been treating Spahn since the boy was 13, in 1977. He explains the 
medical effect of what happened to Spahn. He says that the 8-year-old's surgery
was an experimental procedure at the time, and that while there is not yet 
unity of opinion in the field as to the results of such an operation, the 
literature is clear that the chemical imbalances caused by the removal of the 
brain matter from those areas can in fact cause severe personality changes.

"What happens after a seizure," he explains, "is that the brain goes into what 
is called a `post-dictal state,' where you're not quite sure what is going on. 
You can understand, if the boy has 30 or 35 of these sort of mini-mal seizures 
a day, he is never free of that state of mind." 

The literature, he said, reflects that after an operation such as Spahn's, 
patients develop personality patterns that are completely unknown to them prior
to the operation. "Some people have developed hyper-religiosity," he explains, 
"while others have developed hyper-sexuality, and other hyper symptoms. For 
Spahn to have developed the hyperactivity his mother notes is entirely 
consistent with the pattern of personality change reported by the literature."

The doctor reports that he and his partner saw early on that Spahn's ability to
respond to his environment was so obviously impaired that he was in need of a 
caretaker environment. "He is one of those rare, unfortunate patients who will 
probably always have seizures," the doctor reports. "Even in the first few 
months of this year, when I was seeing him frequently and know he was taking 
his medications, he was still having seizures. We switched his medication two 
or three times to try and find something that would work," Dr. Osborne said 
sadly, "but when I last saw him several months ago he was still having five or 
six seizures every night."  

When the doctor learned that Spahn was probably headed back to prison, this 
time for 25-to-life, his response was one of disgust. "This guy doesn't belong 
in a prison," he declared. "You can lead him around by a ring in his nose he is
so placid. I am not a neuropsychiatrist, but if I was, I'd commit him to a 
state hospital for the developmentally disabled."

When informed that the chief prosecutor, District Attorney Worth Dikeman, had 
called Spahn a "poster boy" for "three strikes" -- that is, just the kind of 
criminal the "three strikes" law was designed to put away -- the doctor 
retorted angrily, "The hell he is! If you want to call him a poster boy, he is 
more like a Ronald Reagan poster boy. He is exactly the kind of person who 
belongs in one of the scores of mental health facilities that Reagan 
dismembered when he was governor."

Spahn's first two "strikes" were for crimes very similar to the ones for which 
he is now awaiting trial. When he was almost 21 years old, he was convicted of 
two counts of residential burglary. He served two years in prison after 
spending a year in the county jail awaiting trial. He was paroled on June 23, 
1987, and on Aug. 18, 1987, he was again arrested and charged with two counts 
of residential burglary. He returned to prison in October 1987 and was paroled 
after spending six years behind bars.

One of Spahn's victims, the woman whose home is represented by count two of his
current, "third-strike" prosecution, has strong feelings about what should 
happen to him now.

Nancy Morse is a single parent in her 40s. She lives with her two daughters, 
ages 6 and 7. Her eldest daughter lives away from home and attends college. 
Morse takes legal courses at College of the Redwoods and hopes to become a 
legal assistant or paralegal so she can get off AFDC. "I really hate not being 
able to support myself and the kids," she says. 

The burglary had an unintended consequence for Morse's youngest. The 
6-year-old's birthday was July 25, and Morse was carefully saving her food 
stamps so the youngster could have several of her friends over for the 
celebration. But on July 23 disaster struck -- disaster in the form of Ricky 
Spahn. Morse reported that at some point during the early afternoon, someone 
came in the rear door of her home and took her purse. About an hour after she 
noticed it missing, a neighbor called and reported he had found it in an alley 
near her house. It was returned to her, minus some makeup, $133 in food stamps 
and about $50 in cash. 

In describing the burglary at the Morse residence, Spahn said that he saw some 
people out front trying to jump-start a car, so he quickly snuck into the house
through an open back door. He entered the back yard through an alley, and left 
unobserved the same way.

When Morse learned from Detective Charles Swanson that Spahn was a 
"third-strike" candidate and would be going to prison for a long, long time for
his crime, she immediately took issue with the possible sentence. "I just don't
think the sentence is appropriate to the type of crimes he has committed," she 
declares with feeling. "I mean, according to what the officer said, none of 
them was violent. He just isn't a violent person." Her voice becomes more 
animated as she adds, "There are people who have raped that are walking around 
out there. Prison beds should be saved for them. We should save the jail time 
for those people, not people who don't hurt others."
Morse also spoke to Spahn's lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Jim Steinberg, and 
learned of Spahn's physical condition and the seizures from which he suffers 
constantly. She was told that smoking marijuana makes Spahn "feel better" about
the pain from his seizures. "My God," she said, "once you know his motive, the 
burglary doesn't even seem criminal. All kinds of people need marijuana for 
medical problems such as glaucoma and cancer, and if it helps them cope with 
their pain, they should be able to have it prescribed for them by a doctor."

"I feel strongly about this," she says. "It is really an issue society needs to
confront. And I can't help but think that given his medical problem, a sentence
like closely supervised community service would be a more appropriate 
justice-system reaction anyway. Who's to say he can't make some kind of 
contribution," she asks, "to pay society back for what he has done?"
Morse's understanding that Spahn is not a violent person was confirmed by the 
detective who questioned him after his arrest, and who in fact has arrested 
Spahn on four or five previous occasions. At the preliminary hearing, Swanson 
testified that he got along well with Spahn. He said that Spahn had never 
resisted arrest or caused any problems of violence in his presence and was 
generally cooperative with him. The detective also testified that the type of 
burglaries Spahn committed would be less likely to involve confrontations with 
people in the house.

Swanson was also asked about Spahn's cognitive ability, his ability to 
understand. "Well," replied the detective, "I think if things are spoken in 
simple sentences and questions and answers that he understands."

The charges facing Ricky Spahn have been the source of some attention in the 
media along the North Coast, where interest in the Proposition 184 is running 
high. Both of Humboldt County's legislators are asking constituents to vote no 
on the "three strikes" initiative even though both of them voted in favor of 
the March 1994 "three strikes" law that is now on the books.  

State Senator Mike Thompson says that seeing the law in actual practice has 
convinced him its broad sweep is a mistake. "In some ways it doesn't go far 
enough. In other ways, it goes too far," the senator told the North County 
Journal. "I want the people to vote against Prop. 184 so the Legislature can go
back in January and make that third strike a hit that puts away the ones that 
should be put away, but doesn't waste money on petty thieves." Assemblyman Dan 
Hauser agrees.

And the North County Journal opined in its cover story on Spahn, "Wardens may 
soon have to face the question: Where will we put the rapists and the murderers
if all the beds hold burglars and thieves?" 


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