The mother of a woman accused of fatally beating a man at a West Sacramento motel says her daughter was acting in self-defense that June morning.
Susan Garza, a former Davis resident who now lives in Placerville, said her daughter Kelly Dema Carew “has never been a violent person, ever. She’s always been sweet, even to trees and plants.”
Garza said in a phone interview Thursday that something went terribly wrong during the early hours of June 17 at the Great Value Inn on West Sacramento’s West Capitol Avenue that forced her daughter to lash out at Herbert Ublic Rhodes Jr.
According to Garza, Carew claims 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.”
Carew, 26, has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge stemming from the fatal beating. She appeared briefly Thursday in Yolo Superior Court, where Judge David Reed granted defense attorneys’ request to postpone the trial from September to Oct. 5.
The Yolo County District Attorney’s Office has declined to comment on the alleged motive in the case.
Motel residents testified at Carew’s July 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 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. She is being held without bail at the Yolo County Jail while her case is pending.
Garza said she’s visited her daughter several times at the jail, where she appears to be stabilized and in good spirits despite a troubled past.
Once active in dance and cheerleading while growing up in Citrus Heights, Carew was in her mid-teens when she met an older man who took her out of state on multiple occasions, according to Garza. She was gone for about a year at first, came home pregnant, then left again after having the baby.
“Gosh knows what he did to her,” Garza said. When Carew returned for good, she finished high school and earned a lab technician license, but took to living on the streets.
Her criminal history has been minimal, comprising a drug conviction in Sacramento County five years before her arrest in connection with Rhodes’ death.
“She’s a real smart girl. It’s just been so sad,” Garza said. “We all love her very much.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene