SAN JOSE — Criminal proceedings against a Milpitas woman charged with the notorious killing of her two best friends within hours of each other in late August have been halted after her defense attorney raised doubts to a judge Thursday about her mental fitness to stand trial.
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Anila Baby, 32, will now be directed to the Santa Clara County Superior Court’s mental-health calendar, where she will await the selection of court-appointed doctors who will assess her competence to participate in her criminal defense. The evaluation process typically takes several months between the appointment of doctors, their examinations, and the submission of their reports to the court.
In a statement after the Thursday morning court hearing, defense attorney Shawn George said his time with Baby spurred clear concerns about her mental state.
“Based on my in-person conversations with my client, I have doubts as to my client’s competency to stand trial,” George said. “After my client is evaluated for competency, we will come back to court to address this issue based on the evaluators’ reports.”
Deputy District Attorney Marisa McKeown said Thursday: “We await further evaluation by the court appointed doctors.”
The case is scheduled to return to court Oct. 16. There is no timetable for when the criminal case might resume.
The police investigation into the Aug. 28 killings of Ann Mary Mathew, 39, at the victim’s San Jose home and of 35-year-old Anjana Hari in the parking lot of a Milpitas apartment complex included potential indications of a psychiatric crisis. When Milpitas police officers found Baby in a parking lot after Hari was killed, they described her as incoherent and unable to answer questions.
The killings first surfaced around noon on Aug. 28, Milpitas police were called to a collision in a parking lot at the Mill Creek Apartments on Dixon Landing Road in Milpitas, with witnesses describing a blue Toyota Highlander SUV fleeing the scene, and hitting three parked vehicles on the way out.
Milpitas police detectives wrote in a probable cause affidavit that officers found Hari suffering from “severe head trauma and bleeding,” and she was pronounced dead at the scene.
Baby was then seen driving recklessly past patrol vehicles headed to the apartments, and she pulled into a Walgreens parking lot on North Milpitas Boulevard, where officers arrested her.
Witnesses reported that before the collision, Hari seemed relaxed and smiling as she approached Baby’s SUV, but that once Hari stepped in front of the car, Baby accelerated from a dead stop and hit Hari. Another witness who lives at the complex told police they recognized Baby and had to move out of the way of her speeding SUV.
About two hours later, Mathew was found dead by her husband at their San Jose home on Linda Vista Street off Toyon Avenue. Mathew was “on the ground, in a pool of blood, with a knife next to her, according to a 911 dispatch recording archived online.
San Jose police wrote in their own probable cause affidavit that Mathew had injuries to her head and extremities. The Santa Clara County Office of the Medical Examiner concluded that she died from “combined strangulation … blunt trauma of head and face; and incised wounds.”
Because Mathew’s husband was aware of Hari’s death when he went to check on his wife, San Jose homicide detectives quickly began linking the two killings. The SJPD affidavit states that detectives found evidence of a struggle “and blood clean up,” and that Mathew’s phone was gone. They also reviewed motion-activated surveillance footage from the home, and found that someone had deleted video clips recorded at 10:37 a.m. and around 11:35 a.m.
One of the video clips that remained showed a sandal on a front door mat. The affidavit states that the sandal seen in the video clip matched what Baby was wearing when she was arrested in Milpitas, and that officers found Mathew’s phone in Baby’s vehicle.
Detectives obtained a witness statement attesting that Mathew “received an unexpected visitor” around the time the first surveillance clip was deleted, and that no one else went to the home until Mathew’s husband found her. The affidavit further states that surveillance footage and license-plate reading cameras, as well as Baby’s cell phone signal, all placed her at Mathew’s home around the time she was killed.
Police also noted that the injuries and blood observed on Baby when she was arrested were inconsistent with a collision, and that the amount of blood on her did not match her injuries. Additionally, blood on Baby’s clothing matched Mathew’s DNA, according to the affidavit.
The Milpitas investigation confirmed through family members that Baby and Hari were good friends and neighbors at the Mill Creek complex, and public records show Mathew also recently lived there before moving to San Jose. All three women hail from the southern Indian state of Kerala, according to media from that region.
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