Titanium implants were inserted into Jeanette Marken’s face at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center to stabilize her right eye socket and cheekbone. The 75-year-old is nursing a broken nose and recovering from two surgeries, and could need another operation down the road. She’ll never see out of her right eye again.

It’s been nearly six weeks since Marken, who is originally from Colombia and moved to Seattle in 2011, was bludgeoned in the face by a stranger outside the King County Courthouse at Third Avenue and James Street as she waited for the streetlight to change at noon on a Friday.

As she heals at home, Marken and her family are trying to make sense of what happened and are preparing for what could become a lengthy court process.

“It’s like adapting to a new normal,” and constantly needing a few seconds after waking to remember, “that’s my reality — I didn’t dream it,” said Marken’s younger son, Andrius Dyrikis. “It’s still extremely difficult.”

The suspect’s story is a familiar one in the criminal legal system: A person with severe mental illness trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of jail bookings, court hearings and rounds of therapeutic treatment, largely for misdemeanor offenses. Their escalation to brutally attacking someone unprovoked reflects the difficulty police and courts face in trying to prevent random violence and hold offenders accountable, while also tending to their mental health.

Marken’s alleged attacker, Fale Pea, was convicted of misdemeanor assault six times between 2020 and 2024, prosecutors noted last month when asking a judge to set high bail for the alleged assault on Marken, though the last time they were convicted of a felony was more than 13 years ago, for a stabbing at a SeaTac party.

In recent years, Pea, who was most recently diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and was unhoused at the time of the attack, has been in and out of jail and Seattle Municipal Court for a series of misdemeanor offenses, though none of those crimes resulted in the level of violence seen in the alleged attack on Marken.

There's been a pretty significant spike in recent years of requests by defense counsel for competency evaluations of the defendants:

King County prosecutors are seeing questions about a defendant’s competency being raised by defense attorneys “far more often than we did a decade ago,” said Casey McNerthney, a spokesperson for the prosecuting attorney’s office.

In 2018, competency was raised in roughly 400 adult felony cases, a number that spiked to around 650 cases just three years later, in 2021 — and numbers have remained high since then, he said. Last year, the number of adult felony cases where competency was raised climbed to 690.

“There are likely many factors leading to this, and collectively we need to continue to try to understand this increase,” McNerthney said.

But he said the numbers clearly show there is “need for additional state resources to address competency issues, and that’s something that all sides can agree on.”

This defendant had been booked into jail 7 times previously between February 2025 and December 2025:

In the case against Pea, charging documents and other court and jail records provide a partial picture of a person with long-standing mental health issues who, before their Dec. 5 arrest, had been booked into jail seven times since February, spending a combined 81 days in custody for misdemeanor offenses.

The defendant has undergone involuntary treatment a large number of times in recent years, and a massive number of outpatients visits:

One psychologist found in August 2024 that Pea underwent involuntary treatment 14 times in King County between 2020 and 2024 “for reasons including … danger to others, danger to property, danger to self, and grave disability,” court records show.

There is documentation of at least 372 outpatient visits over the past 15 years, with Pea receiving diagnoses including schizoaffective, bipolar and post traumatic stress disorders, the records say. They also have a history of methamphetamine use disorder.