A Baltimore prosecutor was baffled when a report by state psychiatrists about the sanity of a mother who killed her two young children in 2021 seemingly dismissed the woman’s bizarre behavior leading up to the kids’ deaths.

The forensic doctors with the Maryland Department of Health believed Jameria Hall left a burner on to set fire to her apartment to conceal evidence of her children’s deaths, saying that suggested she knew killing them was wrong and thus was sane at the time, the prosecutor, Tracy Varda, said in court.

But the doctors’ conclusion glossed over a brush found in a pan on the stove, Varda said. Hall told investigators she cut off the children’s hair because she thought it “controlled them” and placed hair in the pan along with a brush to “break the spell” she believed relatives had cast on her kids.

That was one of what Varda described as several questionable interpretations by state doctors of evidence in the gruesome August 2021 killings that led the prosecutor to hire an expert to evaluate the state psychiatrists’ work and ultimately support the defense’s position: Hall was suffering from a mental disorder at the time and should be found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.

Hall, 31, pleaded guilty to two counts each of first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in the deaths of 6-year-old Da’Neria Thomas and 8-year-old Davin Thomas. A judge at the same April hearing found Hall not criminally responsible, ordering her committed indefinitely to the health department.

Retired Judge Gale E. Rasin, who presides over Baltimore Circuit Court’s Mental Health Court program, said Hall suffered from schizoaffective disorder, depressive type — a thought, delusional and mood condition — and found she “lacked the substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of her conduct and … conform her conduct to the requirements of law.”

People committed to the health department for crimes of violence go to the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup, the state’s maximum security psychiatric facility. Eventually doctors could recommend Hall for “conditional release” because of successful treatment, but that decision would fall to a judge and prosecutors would have an opportunity to weigh in.

“Nobody today can tell you when, if ever, there will be a recommendation for you to be conditionally released,” Rasin told Hall, before asking whether she understood.

“Yes,” Hall responded.

‘Mommy, no!’

Almost three years ago, homicide detectives were summoned to the grisly crime scene in Southwest Baltimore.

A maintenance worker asked to investigate a foul smell entered an apartment Aug. 24, 2021, and found the decomposing bodies of two children, according to charging documents. Davin was found in a sleeping bag, with a knife still stuck in his chest and a black trash bag over his head. Da’Neria was found in the bathtub with an article of clothing wrapped around her neck.

Neighbors recalled hearing children screaming “Mommy, no!” about five days before their bodies were found.

Police announced charges against Hall less than a day later. Detectives wrote in charging documents that she confessed in an interview at the homicide unit.

In the following days, warning signs of a woman struggling with mental illness emerged.

About three years before killing her children, Hall turned her parents’ gas oven to high, ignited the stove burners, assembled a shrine of family photos and left their house to burn. She pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced to a year in prison.

Before long, she was back raising her kids.

In four episodes of a podcast Hall recorded, “BMoreE Charming,” she spoke of trying to start a line of T-shirts and cosmetics, reads her children a bedtime book, and explains the arson case as her “mental breakdown.” Hall also spoke of her struggles with mental illness.

“My anger develops my anxiety; my anxiety develops my stress; my stress triggers my depression,” she said. “I fall into depression when I just cannot control the stress.”

Hall’s plea hearing April 17, held over Zoom, provided the most details to date about her struggles leading up to the children’s killings.

Her boyfriend told investigators he observed a change in Hall’s behavior about a week before the killings, Varda said.

“She told him she thought her family was plotting to kill her,” the prosecutor said.

The last time the boyfriend saw Hall before the killings, she ordered him into the trunk of her car and drove him around for hours, Varda said. At one point, she locked him in a storage unit.

The state psychiatrists chalked up the behavior to anger issues. They also said Hall had a financial motive to kill.

A health department spokesman declined to comment on Hall’s case, but said in a statement the department “is committed to working with the courts, providing medically appropriate and timely responses when doing mental health examinations.”

‘I was hearing voices’

Mary Pizzo, one of Hall’s attorneys, who led the public defender’s forensic mental health division for 11 years before retiring recently, called it “unusual” for the prosecution to disagree with a report from health department doctors.

Troubled by the doctors’ conclusions, Varda dug in.

The prosecutor said she watched Hall’s police interview from the arson case. She subpoenaed records from the hospital Hall went to after the murders, reviewed Hall’s detention records, listened to jail calls Hall made with her incarcerated brother before the killings, and examined Hall’s Facebook page, which featured pictures showing “happy, cared-for children.”

“What I was finding was just not making sense with what was in the report,” Varda said.

In a jail call after Hall was arrested, she described suffering hallucinations when she stopped medication.

“I was hearing voices thinking the kids were other people for real,” Hall said. “It was crazy.”

The calls between Hall and her incarcerated brother in the two weeks before the killings were illuminating to an expert that prosecutors hired to review the health department doctors’ report. Varda said the prosecution’s expert concluded the calls showed Hall was suffering from psychosis.

One call offered a grim foreshadow.

“She said ‘This is a life and death situation. I got to act on it because I got to save us,” Varda said, quoting the call.

In another, Hall described her son as “the storm” and daughter as “the rainbow child.”

“I’ve been talking with mommy about spirit s—,” Varda recalled Hall saying on one call. “Then there’s just rambling. Then she’s talking about love and finding her final destination.”

‘It’s just really heartbreaking’

Hall appeared for court by video from Maryland Correctional Institution – Women in Jessup. She hung her head for much of the hearing, at times becoming emotional. Pizzo wrapped her arm around Hall. When Davin’s love for the Ninja Turtles cartoon was discussed, Hall burst into tears.

Relatives expressed dismay over the outcome of Hall’s case.

“Hearing all these testimonies from the state’s attorney, doctors, some of that stuff is untrue,” the children’s grandmother, Jennifer Jordan, said in court. “It’s just really heartbreaking.”

The children’s father, Devin Thomas, didn’t have much to add.

“Just imagine losing y’all children to the significant other, or whatever — the person who said they loved them,” Thomas said.

The hearing, however, focused primarily on the conflicting findings from doctors.

“Nothing that any psychiatrist can say and nothing that I can say today can take that horror and pain and your suffering away,” Rasin said. “The intention of all this information being put out there was just that, to give you information.”

While the health department doctors believed Hall was criminally responsible, a forensic psychiatrist hired by the defense came to the opposite conclusion. Only the report by the defense’s doctor was admitted as evidence in the hearing.

Before finding Hall not criminally responsible, Rasin lauded Varda for conducting an “extraordinary investigation” into Hall’s mental health.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, that a prosecutor would go to these lengths to look at every single bit of available evidence, whether it’s jail calls or interviews, and finally seeking her own expert, which doesn’t happen very often,” Rasin said.

Calling it a “tremendously serious and tragic case,” Hall’s other attorney, public defender Deborah Levi, said the defense is “grateful that the State and the Court acknowledged the serious mental health illness underlying this tragedy.”

The judge did not mince words when speaking about the work of the health department doctors, who suggested Hall was malingering, or faking symptoms.

However, Hall previously was deemed incompetent to stand trial and sent to Perkins for treatment to restore her ability to assist in her own defense. She spent about a year there under the treatment of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, who diagnosed her with schizoaffective disorder.

Varda and Rasin said the health department forensic doctors ignored her treatment team’s observations and diagnoses.

“I don’t understand, frankly, how [the doctors] could have come to this result, frankly emphasizing and exaggerating certain facts,” Rasin said.

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