WOODLAND — “Had fun last night … im a hero and no one will ever know how funny it was.”
Yolo County prosecutors say Lauren Kirk-Coehlo tweeted that message a day after allegedly causing $7,000 in damage to the Islamic Center of Davis last month, and that it and her other social-media comments make her an “extreme public safety risk” who should be jailed without bail.
“Here, the risk to public safety is palpable and alarming. It is one thing to harbor hateful thoughts,” Deputy District Attorney Ryan Couzens wrote in a motion to deny bail, noting Kirk-Coehlo’s reported use of racial epithets, praise for mass killers and online searches using terms such as “throw jew down the well,” “gas jews,” “bomb vest” and “hate is good.”
“Ms. Coehlo has shown she is willing to act on her racist and hateful beliefs, that she sees herself as a ‘hero’ doing it, that she harbors a desire to ‘kill many people,’ that she is collaborating with like-minded people and she is at least looking for information on devices used to cause mass damage,” Couzens wrote.
Kirk-Coehlo’s bail remained at $1 million following her arraignment hearing Thursday in Yolo Superior Court, where through her privately retained attorneys, Steven Sabbadini and David Dratman, she pleaded not guilty to felony charges of vandalism with a hate-crime enhancement, and vandalism of a church.
At the defense attorneys’ request, Commissioner Kent O’Mara scheduled a Feb. 23 bail hearing in the case “to re-evaluate bail, because our request would be a reduction in bail, or perhaps supervised OR (release on own recognizance) with bail,” Sabbadini said.
Though Couzens requested an immediate hearing on the bail issue, O’Mara instructed him to raise it before Judge Daniel Maguire, who has been assigned to preside over the case. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for March 6.
Kirk-Coehlo, who appeared in court wearing a green-and-white striped jail jumpsuit with her wrists shackled in front of her, spoke only to say “yes” when O’Mara asked if she would waive her legal right to have a preliminary hearing within 10 court days.
Sabbadini and Dratman declined to comment on the allegations in the case as they left the courtroom, as did Couzens.
Kirk-Coehlo’s preliminary hearing is where prosecutors will lay out the evidence they say implicates the Davis High School and UC Berkeley graduate in the Jan. 22 crime, in which the suspect was caught on security camera smashing windows, damaging bicycles and wrapping raw bacon — a prohibited food in the Muslim religion — around an exterior door handle at the Russell Boulevard mosque.
Davis police and FBI officers, who conducted a joint investigation in the case, arrested Kirk-Coehlo on Tuesday morning.
Her bail was set by Judge Samuel McAdam at $1 million — well beyond the $40,000 those charges typically carry — based on a Davis police detective’s declaration in which he described Kirk-Coehlo as “an immediate danger to the public,” having professed “dreams and aspirations” of killing people and glorifying mass shooters in her social media postings.
“3 cheers for Dylan (sic) Roof,” Kirk-Coehlo posted in her Twitter account regarding the man sentenced to death for shooting nine African-Americans at their Charleston, S.C. church, Detective Dan LaFond wrote in the document filed Tuesday in court.
Asked via Twitter private message whether she had ever killed anything, Kirk-Coehlo replied, “No but i want to i have dreams and aspirations” and “I would like to kill … many people,” according to the declaration and to Couzens’ bail motion.
The declaration says police culled the postings from Kirk-Coehlo’s seized cell phone. She also used her phone to conduct online searches for mosques in Davis, Woodland and other parts of the country; bomb vests; and Alexandre Bissonnette, the suspect in the Jan. 29 Quebec Islamic Cultural Center attack that left six people dead and 19 injured.
Kirk-Coehlo also “made derogatory remarks using the terms ‘Jews, Mexicans and (N—–s)’ on a regular basis” and described herself as having “mental problems” in texts to her mother, the document says.
“… Kirk-Coehlo’s hate-motivated vandalism along with her glorification of Roof and Bissonnette, who recently killed African Americans and Muslims in their place of worship, along with her own statement of having dreams and aspirations of killing, concern law enforcement,” LaFond wrote. “I do not believe $40,000 is sufficient bail in this case.”
The online postings have struck a new wave of fear among members of the Davis Islamic Center, according to executive board president Mohamed Kheiter, who said the board has been asked to enact additional security protocols after news of the postings broke Wednesday.
“There is a lot of concern that we’re no longer safe, especially if she gets released. They’re really afraid,” said Kheiter, adding that the board is considering protective measures such as armed security, extra police patrols and locking the mosque doors during prayer gatherings.
“If it happened in Quebec, it can happen here,” Kheiter said. “They’re afraid she may have associates. The police said no, but who knows?”
Hamza El-Nakhal, former president of the Islamic Center of Davis, said earlier this week that he initially considered Kirk-Coehlo’s bail to be excessive when he first learned of it.
However, “after reading this document, I think the judge is very wise to agree with the investigating peace officer,” said El-Nakhal, who attended Thursday’s arraignment hearing.
Noting Kirk-Coehlo’s reported references to a bomb vest and mental-health issues, “I think the high bail will not only protect the community from any further events, but also protect her from harming herself.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene
