June 6-13: Marital Squabble Gets Testy in Fair Oaks

Phone phight

A marital squabble escalated with the husband allegedly striking his wife in the head with a cell phone Saturday night.

Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies arrested Scott Suva, 40, of Fair Oaks for reportedly hitting his 44-year-old wife in the head with a cell phone during a verbal argument at their Mercer Way home, said a sheriff’s department report. Suva was booked at the Sacramento County jail on charges of inflicting visible injury on a spouse or cohabitant and parole violation.

Suva had already gone to court by Wednesday, said sheriff’s department spokesman Deputy Jason Ramos, but it didn’t appear formal charges were brought against him by the county District Attorney’s Office, according to online court records.

Paul Durenberger, the supervising deputy district attorney who oversees the office’s domestic violence unit, didn’t comment on the Suva arrest, but said there are many factors that can complicate the decision to prosecute.

Often there are conflicting accounts of who did what to whom first, victims recant because of economic factors or family pressure or because the court process takes too long, and claims are sometimes exaggerated, he explained.

“All these dynamics that go into it make it very difficult,” Durenberger said. “If you’ve been doing this for a while, you realize just because you arrest somebody, they may not get prosecuted or get what you think of as justice.”

Of the approximately 7,500 cases the unit does prosecute annually, Durenberger said the victims recant in roughly 80 percent of them by the time they get to trial.

The domestic violence unit is the largest in the DA’s office, larger than even the office’s homicide team.

Pulp nonfiction

A samurai sword, a car chase and a stolen laptop. It almost sounds like the pitch to a Pulp Fiction-style tale, but those three ingredients actually factored into a bizarre confrontation sheriff’s investigators have yet to untangle.

According to a summary report from the June 9 incident, a 35-year-old woman crashed the Orangevale house of her ex-boyfriend’s buddy, literally, by ramming her maroon Suburban into the front gate surrounding the driveway. She then reportedly chased one of his other male friends with a samurai sword, and got back into her car once the 22-year-old man escaped in his vehicle.

Ramos says she pursued this former acquaintance of hers roughly two miles, and attempted to ram his car near Hazel Avenue and Greenback Lane. The 22-year-old man said he had three children in his car at the time, but refused to give their information to deputies because, Ramos said, the man wanted to leave them out of it.

After the bedlam subsided, the ex-boyfriend, who had been visiting his friend’s Shoshone Way home along with the 22-year-old male, discovered his laptop was missing.

No arrests have been reported, and Ramos said the woman’s motivations were unknown.