After more than two years of awaiting trial on murder charges, a woman pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter this week for fatally beating a man at a West Sacramento motel in 2015.
Kelly Dena Carew, 28, also admitted to a charge of dissuading a witness, according to the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 27 to 14 years in state prison.
Carew faced life in prison if convicted of murder for the June 17, 2015, death of Herbert Ublic Rhodes Jr. at the Great Value Inn on West Capitol Avenue.
Motel residents testified at Carew’s preliminary hearing that they were awakened at about 4:20 a.m. to sounds of items being thrown from a bathroom window, followed by a woman saying “Good boy, daddy — you’re being a good boy, daddy” and a man saying, “Open the door.”
Moments later, witnesses said, a woman was seen beating a man over the head near the motel lobby — first with a metal shower-curtain rod, then with what appeared to be bricks.
Rhodes, 60, died at the scene, where police took a distressed, erratic Carew into custody a short time later. Her trial, rescheduled several times, was set to begin next week.
Deputy Public Defender Emily Fisher, Carew’s attorney, declined to comment on the plea agreement prior to the sentencing hearing.
Carew’s mother, former Davis resident Susan Garza, told The Enterprise in an August 2015 interview that her daughter likely was acting in self-defense during the incident.
According to Garza, Carew claimed Rhodes offered to photograph her after meeting her on the streets, “so she agreed to that, and then it turned into something else.”
Carew told her mother that Rhodes tried to physically harm her, prompting her to lock herself in a bathroom and throw items out of a window to try to get someone’s attention. When she came out, “he grabbed her as she came out the door.”
Armed with a shower-curtain rod, “she kept hitting him and hitting him,” Garza said. “She said, ‘I had to kill him — he was a rabid dog.’ She was trying to get out of there, and no one would help her.”
“She has never been a violent person, ever. She’s always been sweet, even to trees and plants,” Garza added.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene