Woman shot at police HQ left odd voice mail, letter

The Chronicle has a little more today on the woman who a police officer shot early Sunday when she lunged at him with a knife in the lobby of HPD headquarters: The day before she showed up at 1200 Travis, Marnell Villarreal left a rambling, cryptic voice mail message with an attorney who had represented her about 14 years ago. Attorney Clyde Miller said the message was mostly unintelligible, but he could make out Villarreal saying that she was afraid of being kidnapped by people who "are definitely getting more out of control."

The tone of the message, Miller said, was similar to a 13-page letter he received from Villarreal in March, in which she claimed that law enforcement officers had poisoned her with arsenic and implanted electronic tracking devices inside her when she was in the Harris County Jail. "I can feel some sort of energy wave in my body that wasn't there before going to jail," she wrote. "I didn't really act on [the letter] because a lot of it is really bizarre," Miller said. It's not clear whether the voice mail message was related in any way to the incident early Sunday morning, in which Villarreal rushed through a metal detector at police headquarters holding a knife and screaming at the two officers on duty in the lobby to kill her. Officer E.D. Smith fired a Taser at Villarreal, but it might not have made contact with her; when Villarreal got within a few feet of Officer A.B. Clay, Clay fired a single shot into her chest. Villarreal was later pronounced dead at Memorial Hermann hospital.

The picture of Villarreal we get from the voice mail message and letter is a bit different from the one her sister, Dinah Charles, painted in an interview with KHOU. Charles apologized for Villarreal's behavior, saying she was at fault for the shooting: "She was wrong for going in there and messing with them that's all I know,” Charles said. "I don't blame [the police]. They was only doing their job. They are not the fault of her — if she had not been down there harassing them every day, as she had been doing, none of this would have come up." Charles said Villarreal had filed police reports claiming someone in Tomball was trying to kill her, and she said Villarreal had taken to visiting the police station nearly every day — often carrying a knife. But that doesn't mean she had mental problems, Charles said: "Ain't nothing mental or crazy about my sister. Just a lot of pretending."