Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón’s reformist approach to juvenile justice was made for someone like Denmon Lee.
When he was 16, Lee took part in an Antelope Valley gas station robbery that left former Marine John Ruh dead. According to court records, Lee, who was acquainted with the victim, planned the 2018 robbery and provided a weapon to his co-defendant. Although Lee was not the shooter, he was charged with murder.
But when Gascón took office two years later, as Lee’s case was moving through the court system, he barred prosecutors from prosecuting juveniles as adults. Lee was convicted and ordered to be held at the county’s secure youth treatment facility in Sylmar until he was 25.
Officials said Lee “responded very well” to programs in custody. Within a year, probation officers transferred him from the high-security Sylmar facility to a rehabilitation-focused setting in Malibu. After his release to a halfway house last June, Lee enrolled in community college and found work at a local nonprofit.
And then, in April, he was arrested and accused of playing a major role in another murder.
The case has given Gascón’s critics an opportunity to directly link the progressive district attorney’s policies to violent crime, which some argue could have been prevented if Lee had been given a harsher sentence in adult court. Gascón’s opponent, Nathan Hochman, who is running for re-election in November, has spent a lot of time highlighting high-profile crimes that he believes are symptoms of the current president’s policies.
Some juvenile law experts believe Lee’s case is an isolated one that doesn’t refute the research supporting Gascón’s modus operandi. But his alleged role in the killing of 28-year-old Eric Ruffins earlier this year has sparked outrage among victims — and given the district attorney’s political opponents a new weapon.
“If Gascon had not prevented (Lee) from being tried in adult court, he would have been sentenced to life in prison. Instead, he was set free to commit another horrific murder,” said Kathy Cady, a victim-rights attorney representing Ruh’s widow. Cady was among those who led efforts in recent years to remove Gascon from office.
Some? Criminologists as well as the Times’ analysis of court data have raised doubts Attempts to place the blame solely on Gascón’s policies for the upsurge in crime rates are redundant, and his handling of the initial murder case against Lee is not much different from how California’s criminal justice system treats juveniles.
After several changes to state law to keep juveniles out of adult jails, only 12 juvenile cases were successfully transferred to adult court in 2022, the last year for which such data is public. In 2016, the last year when prosecutors could file adult charges directly against juveniles, 340 youths were tried as adults statewide, records show.
“People are often more dangerous when they come out of prison than they were before they went in,” said Sean Garcia-Leys, co-executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center in Fullerton. “We need to see what the data show about the effectiveness of different types of punishments in reducing recidivism.”
Former Marine John Ruh, 61, was killed in 2018 during a robbery at an Antelope Valley gas station in which prosecutors considered Denmon Lee, then 16, a “key participant.”
(Kathleen Cady)
Gascón’s opposition to trying juveniles as adults has been one of his most controversial policies. His decision in 2022 not to charge them Hannah Tubbs, 26 years old His sexual assault of a child as an adult, which occurred when Tubbs was 17, received widespread criticism. Gascón was suspended as a result of the incident Turning on Previous and create a system for prosecutors to have cases transferred to adult court after rigorous review.
However, Lee’s first case was settled while Gascon’s ban was still in place.
According to testimony given during an appellate court hearing, Lee walked into VP Fuels and Drive-Thru Dairy in Lancaster on Feb. 19, 2018, and asked cashier Rauh for a cigarette. Court records show the request was a distraction so his accomplice, Deonta “Fatboy” Johnson, could get close to Rauh with a gun and demand he open the cash register.
After a brief encounter, Johnson shot Rauh, 61, three times. Detectives said Lee left the scene “smiling,” and later described the crime in detail to his girlfriend, claiming he had “a body on his gun,” according to court testimony.
Lee was arrested that March and charged with murder. A hearing to transfer him to adult court began in April 2020, but Lee changed attorneys and the hearing was delayed until Gascón took over, records show.
Cady opposed the plan to try Lee as a juvenile. The lawyer said in court papers that Lee had obtained a cellphone while in juvenile detention and “sent a threatening video rap to his ex-girlfriend, promising to shoot her.”
“That same wife that I call my baby mama, she snitched on a man,” Lee rapped, according to court records. “When I catch that wife, I’m gonna shoot her right between her eyes.”
Cady said his effort to prevent the case from being moved to juvenile court failed, and prosecutors did not pursue charges of influencing witnesses related to the video.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment on the tampering allegation or the video. The office said in a statement that despite Gascón’s policy, Lee’s case should have remained in juvenile court because he was not a shooter and had no prior record of violence.
“His prior criminal history and other factors governing transfer decisions strongly support his eligibility for rehabilitation in the juvenile justice system,” the statement said. “There was no reasonable probability that the juvenile court would have transferred him to adult court.”
The district attorney’s office said that since forming a committee to allow prosecutors to try some juveniles as adults, it has signed off on 20 transfer motions, with only one case ultimately receiving judicial approval.
In 2022, the California Legislature also raised the standard for prosecuting a juvenile as an adult, requiring prosecutors to prove “by clear and convincing evidence” that the juvenile cannot be rehabilitated in a youth facility.
Jerod Gunsberg, a veteran criminal defense attorney who frequently represents juveniles in Los Angeles, said that even before the law change, the judge was unlikely to try Lee as an adult.
“If you look at a young man who has no history of violence prior to this incident, who was not the shooter, who may have planned a robbery that tragically went bad, I think this is a case that should not have been transferred to adult court, even in 2018,” Gunsberg said.
For two years, it seemed as if the decision to keep Lee out of adult court was producing the desired result.
The probation department declined to answer a detailed list of questions from the Times, and probation reports for Lee are not public record. But according to the district attorney’s office, when Lee was transferred out of the high-security Sylmar complex in March 2023 he performed so well that probation officers recommended he be moved to another less restrictive “step down facility.”
Prosecutors and Ruh’s widow supported the move. After serving five years in custody, Lee will be released to a de facto halfway house, where he will still have to obey a curfew and remain under probation supervision but will have more freedom than he had since his 2018 arrest.
According to the district attorney’s office, Lee enrolled in classes at Mission Hills Community College and began working part-time at a Torrance nonprofit called Mass Liberation. Calls and emails to the school and nonprofit seeking comment were not returned.
In the Ruffins case, the second homicide in which Lee is accused, the victim was shot and killed around 5 p.m. on Jan. 19 in the 15600 block of Atlantic Avenue in an unincorporated area near Compton, according to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.
In April, an arrest warrant surfaced naming Lee as an accomplice, records show. A few weeks later, Lee and Devane Cathey were charged with Ruffins’ murder.
The sheriff’s department had no further comment on the shooting. Emails and calls to Lee’s attorney were not returned. A district attorney’s office spokeswoman confirmed Lee has been charged with being an “aider and abettor” and is not suspected of shooting Ruffins, but she declined to provide further details.
Upon learning of the latest allegations against Lee, Cady expressed frustration with Gascón’s repeated justifications of his juvenile policies, in which he cited studies that show adolescent brain development is not complete until age 25.
“The theory is that the brain hasn’t developed and won’t develop until age 26,” he said. “Yet, they are weeded out before age 26.”
Rauh’s widow, Michelle Brace, said she felt betrayed by Lee’s alleged activities near Compton.
“Denmon, you were given a gift and you wasted that gift. Against my family’s wishes, I hoped you would change and help your community. I will always pray for you and your safety. When I heard you were in trouble again, you broke my heart,” she said in court earlier this month. “You gave me hope when you apologized to me for killing my husband. I forgave you, now I feel like a fool.”
In an interview, Brace said that although she had supported Lee’s progress through the juvenile system, she had long been frustrated by Gascón’s initial refusal to try him as an adult.
“They had no idea what they were doing with their directives and what kind of lives they would destroy,” said Bress, who plans to leave California, but not before the November election. “I’m not leaving until George Gascón is out of office.”
