On the morning of April 14, Noemi Guzman walked into a Walmart near 72nd and Pine Street in Omaha, Nebraska. She shoplifted a large kitchen knife from the shelves, approached a woman shopping with a 3-year-old boy, brandished the weapon, and forced the guardian to walk ahead while she took control of the cart with the child inside. She directed them toward the parking lot exit.
When officers arrived and commanded her to drop the knife, she refused. She slashed the toddler across the face. Two officers opened fire and killed her. The boy was rushed to Children's Hospital with injuries described as non-life-threatening.
Guzman was 31 years old and she was no stranger to law enforcement.
Two years prior, she doused her father's home in lighter fluid and set it on fire. She broke into a Catholic church rectory armed with a knife in South Omaha while a priest barricaded himself inside. Despite the severity of both incidents, a judge released her on a personal recognizance bond–no cash, no conditions beyond a promise to return. The court later found her not guilty by reason of insanity and assigned her a treatment plan in 2025. She was scheduled for an annual review on June 12, 2026.
She didn't make it to June 12 and a 3-year-old boy almost didn't make it out of the Walmart parking lot.
The treatment plan the court assigned her—the one meant to manage a woman who had already tried to burn her father alive and terrorized a priest at knifepoint—amounted to periodic check-ins and an annual review. That was it. No secure facility. No meaningful supervision. Just Noemi Guzman, out in the world, with a court date two months away.
Sound familiar? It should.
The same lenient slap on the wrist was just granted to a murderer who stabbed Iryna Zarutska in the neck on the light rail in North Carolina. If it weren't for police intervention, this Omaha toddler could have suffered the same fate as Zarutska.
Violent criminals are free to roam the streets across the United States because of a 1960 law. Dusky v. United States was brought before the Supreme Court that year because Dusky's attorneys believed he was not provided a proper and thorough examination of his mental status. An astonishing 9-0 ruling stated that Dusky needed to have "a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him."
Basically, the Supreme Court—not scientists or medical examiners—decided that the test adopted from England was not thorough enough, so someone needed to come up with something better to determine competency for trial.
That someone didn't come around for another 13 years. A Massachusetts state psychiatrist with a Harvard affiliation received a federal grant and developed the first standardized competency assessment tools in 1973but the first book devoted entirely to the subject wasn't written until 1980, and courts didn't have standardized textbooks to work from until 1986. Nobody voted on it. No legislature debated it. Courts started using the tools because nothing else existed.
Violent criminals are given "fair" punishment determined by a subjective test of their competency, all to give them a sense of human decency. The victims, per the criminal justice system, be damned.
Soad Tabrizi is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a private practice based in Orange County, CA (www.soadtabrizi.com). Soad is also the founder of www.ConservativeCounselors.com.
