Er Tek Eng and his wife walk at the annual National Alliance on Mental Illness Walk in Santa Monica. (Photo by Meng Meng/Neon Tommy)

The 5-foot, 90-pound daughter of Cambodian refugees had been haunted by schizophrenia for 20 years. She was cornered by police, shot and killed inside the clinic where she sought treatment. Jazmyne “saw many crazy people but never believed she was one of them," her sister Nancy Eng said.

Almost two years after the tragedy, Nancy Eng is still pushing the District Attorney to further investigate her sister's death. The family filed a civil lawsuit against Los Angeles Sheriff Department Temple station after a D.A. report in June this year concluded that the officer “acted in lawful defense” in the shooting.

"We were that close to seeing a silver lining," Eng said. "Jazmyne was getting better after all those years of effort. Yet it is all gone with the shooting."

Though Jazmyne's death prompted the Temple Sheriff Department to initiate training in interacting with mentally-ill patients this month, it also highlighted a spate of fatal shooting cases involving mentally-ill patients, and a staggering number of them were identified as dangerous. The family pointed out that law enforcement are not trained or equipped to know how to handle mentally-ill people.

The amount of people suffering from mental illness in prison has quadrupled during the past three decades while those patients institutionalized has dropped from 600 per 10,000, to almost zero. While society is obsessed with decoding the myth of mental illness, they miss a key point -people with mental illness can still be "normal."

Jazmyne Eng was a schizophrenia "consumer," someone who gets a $600 allowance from the government every month to help her “to live a independent life," according to her sister. She had never liked the name “consumer,” coined by a mental illness expert, since she had always been searching for a job where she could fit in. On the day she was shot, Jazmyne skipped her job at a real estate company. She knew the job wasn’t the right one for her, just like dozens she had tried during the past 20 years.

In 1998, three years out of college, Jazmyne, a health science major at California State University Los Angeles, had quit dozens of jobs. She had worked for the L.A. Housing Department, where “her two Latino colleagues embarrassed her by talking in Spanish,” according to her father Er Tek Eng. Another job at a sports store ended for the same reason after she had been promoted to manager.

Jazmyne also got a perfect score on the employment test for the U.S. Postal Service, but she rejected the offer because it did not feel like the right choice, according to her father.

Schizophrenia, which is in the high-functioning mental illness category, is marked by short attention span and paranoia. While it was easy for Jazmyne to get jobs, it was impossible for her to keep them. She would constantly feel like someone was speaking behind her back or picking up on her, which always led to her resigning.

Soon after she graduated, Jazmyne was obsessed with the idea that people didn't like her, a common complaint among new college graduates. But it developed into an illusion that “the CIA was spying on her and trying to hurt her family,” according to Nancy Eng.

“She thought the fire detector was a security camera installed by government,” said Nancy. “Even when we were talking, she tended to believe someone was wiretapping our conversation.”

When Jazmyne’s family was convinced that what she had was more than stress, they suspected she had post-traumatic stress disorder from early childhood memories of labor camps and genocide in Cambodia, a chapter of history that sent hundreds of refugees to Los Angeles. 

Born into a wealthy suburban neighborhood in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Jazmyne’s fate took a sharp turn at the age of 4 when communist rebel army attacked the capital city.

“The city fell under rebel control on April 4, 1974. We had been hiding in our house for three days when the army surrounded the place, pointing machine guns at us, shouting 'you are either going to labor camp or die,'" said her father, Ek Tek Eng.

The family lost everything. For four years, they lived under shabby tents under the biggest trees, drinking water contaminated by corpses and eating boiled rubber tree leaves when food from government was far from enough. Her youngest sister died of starvation and the family couldn’t find enough space to bury her grandmother.

In 1978, the family hiked hundreds of miles to the Thai and Cambodian border, where they were among the last group of refugees rescued by international organizations. The rest were stranded and killed in labor camps.

On her first night in Los Angeles, Jazmyne ate a McDonald’s burger and slept in a motel on Fourth Street. She soon enrolled at Logan Elementary School in Echo Park, where unlike her strong-minded sister Nancy, she became a shy, yet straightforward person who spoke out against bullying.

“She volunteered at all kinds of events – teaching immigrant children English, raising money for Chinese community and mental illness patients. Apart from gardening, helping others was one thing she really enjoyed,” said Jazmyne’s mother.

Rounds of diagnoses from different phychiatrists identified schizophrenia rather than PTSD as a primary cause of Jazmyne’s paranoia, a disease that ripped her mind apart and transformed her into a very self-conscious person. She would have hour-long talks with friends in the front yard of her parent's house in hopes of releasing her pain though talk therapy. They didn’t work. She was slipping into desperation in her last year, avoiding her medications when the side effects became unbearable and locking herself in her tiny bedroom where she blamed herself for not having a family and a job. Nancy invited her on a road trip, which she refused.  

“I remembered her eyes dimmed when I asked her to join us. Jazmyne did not want to burden anyone. Living on temporary job wages and government aids, she couldn't afford travelling even if she really loved to," said Nancy. "And she stubbornly rejected money from anyone.”

In the quiet Rosemead neighborhood, Jazmyne lived in a tiny bedroom with a twin bunk bed, a desk with her old laptop on it, and a closet her father picked up from the roadside and refurbished.

A few days before the shooting happened, Jazmyne and her father had a strange talk.

“She asked me, ‘Why don’t you love me, dad? When we were escaping from the labor camp, walking eight hours a day, why didn't you carry me? I couldn't keep up with you, and all you and mom did was carry my sisters,’” said Ek Tek Eng. “I told her it was because her older sister had and her younger sister was 10 months old and could not walk. But deep inside, I sensed her feeling of being deserted by society just as how she thought how she had been left behind in the escape. ”

The talk about the labor camps was never bought up again. Jazmyne resumed her routine of morning jogging, walking the dog and online job searching.

On Jan. 2, 2012, Jazmyne slid out her house in the early morning. Er Tek Eng thought his daughter might have a job interview, but Jazmyne never went back. She left an unopened Christmas gift from Nancy on her bed, a brand new laptop.

Reach Staff Reporter Meng Meng Here; Follow her on Twitter.