A veteran Los Angeles County prosecutor alleges he faced retaliation from District Attorney George Gascón for exposing misconduct in the widely publicized case of child molester Hannah Tubbs, who began identifying as a transgender woman after her 2014 arrest for the sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl in Palmdale.
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Deputy District Attorney Shea Sanna, 36, said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Aug. 13, in Los Angeles Superior Court that Gascón and his administration pressured him to suppress information about Tubbs’ use of gender identity as a ploy to gain more favorable jail treatment and retaliated against him when he refused to comply.
The lawsuit, which also names Los Angeles County as a defendant, alleges Sanna faced further retaliation after reporting and resisting Gascón’s unethical directives.
“For the past two years, Gascon has tried to silence me,” Sanna said in a statement. “He has suspended me without pay, threatened my livelihood, attacked my credibility, tarnished my reputation, demoted me, investigated me and harassed me, all so I would obey him; so I would stay quiet; so I wouldn’t speak up on behalf of those most affected by his misguided political policies.”
Sanna, who has worked for the District Attorney’s Office since 2018, was suspended for five days without pay in February 2023 for misgendering Tubbs. In October 2023, he was demoted and transferred to the Santa Clarita office, resulting in a pay cut and less meaningful cases, the suit states.
Tubbs was just two weeks shy of her 18th birthday when she was arrested after DNA evidence showed that she sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in the stall of a women’s bathroom inside Denny’s restaurant in Palmdale on New Year’s Day in 2014.
She was sentenced to two years at a juvenile facility after Gascón’s office declined to move the case to adult court.
In a statement, the reform-minded Gascón reaffirmed that he believes juveniles should not be tried as adults, but said he has learned from the Tubbs case that adjustments sometimes are warranted.
In an unrelated case, Tubbs was charged with murder in Kern County for allegedly beating a fellow survivalist group member to death with a rock in 2019. She pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced in December 2023 to 15 years in prison.
Revealing phone call to father
Sanna was assigned the Palmdale sexual assault case against Tubbs on Oct. 28, 2021.
Less than a month later, Tubbs telephoned his father from a Los Angeles County jail indicating that he planned to claim he was transgender to obtain favorable housing in a female juvenile facility, according to the suit.
“On the recordings, Tubbs and his father laughed and joked about his transition and his chosen name of Hannah,” the suit states.
Tubbs allegedly informed his father that although it might be difficult, he needed to refer to him by that name in court and use female pronouns. At all other times, Tubbs’ acquaintances used male pronouns when referring to her during phone calls from jail, the suit says.
Tubbs was convicted of the Palmdale sexual assault on Nov. 30, 2021.
After the hearing, the court bailiff and custody staff notified Sanna that a search of Tubbs’ property bag revealed she had not taken any of the hormone tablets given her to assist with gender transition, as each remained undisturbed in foil packaging.
‘Hands were tied’
Due to a directive from Gascon ending the practice of sending any juveniles to the adult court system, Sanna’s “hands were tied,” prompting him to request that Tubbs be sentenced to a maximum of two years in a secure youth facility, the suit states.
Sanna alleges he was blocked from presenting to the court 256 jail calls detailing Tubbs’ alleged deception and portraying him as a racist, deviant, dangerous sexual predator.
Sanna was removed from the Tubbs case on Feb. 1, 2022, a day after allegedly emailing the jail call recordings to Assistant Head Deputy Frank Santoro and Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Gowan.
The case was assigned to Gowen, who did not review the recordings before authoring a report for a multidisciplinary treatment hearing largely based on the representations of Tubbs, his attorney and his father, the suit says.
“The court did not ask any questions, which Gowen likely would not have been properly prepared to answer, and rubber-stamped the report,” the suit states.
Sanna has acknowledged that in April 2022, after he was removed from the Tubbs case, he asked Larry Droeger, a bureau director for the District Attorney’s Office, for permission to alert the court of Tubbs’ deception.
“My question to you now is this,” Sanna wrote to Droeger, “what do you expect me to do when, as a prosecutor who took an oath to abide by ethical obligations, I am on the sidelines, prohibited from notifying the court of a matter as to which I have relevant material information?”
Critical of other cases
Sanna has been an outspoken critic of Gascón’s handling of other cases, including one involving convicted murderer Andrew Cachu, who was released from custody in 2021 after serving just six years of a 50-year prison sentence when the D.A.’s former special assistant, Alisa Blair, refused to call witnesses during a disposition hearing.
Cachu originally was tried in adult court even though he was two months shy of his 18th birthday when he shot and killed 41-year-old Louis Amela outside a Palmdale restaurant in March 2015. Under changes in state law since then, however, he was entitled to a retroactive transfer hearing to determine if his conviction should be in juvenile or adult court.
While waiting in jail for his case to be resolved, Cachu was told by his mother Bertha Cachu, in a phone conversation that Blair had agreed to intervene on his behalf.
“That’s Gascón’s special adviser,” Bertha Cachu explained to her son in a recording of the call obtained by the Southern California News Group. “Oh my God! She’s going to be coming in your case. Did you hear that, man? She’s good. She’s the one I’ve been emailing back and forth.”
