Jillian Lauren, the bestselling author and wife of Weezer bassist Scott Shriner, appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom Thursday and was granted the right to enter a two-year mental health diversion program.
If she completes the program as ordered, a judge is expected to dismiss the two felony charges filed against her in connection with the wild exchange of gunfire with LAPD officers that left her wounded in her own backyard on April 8. Officials say she fired first.
“We think this was the right resolution,” Lauren’s lawyer, Hilary Lee Potashner, tells Rolling Stone. The attorney and her co-counsel, Georgina Wakefield, said Thursday they’re both “very pleased” that Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Susan J. De Witt found Lauren eligible for the opportunity to have the case dismissed.
According to court sources, the program will require that Lauren participate in regular counseling and submit to random drug and alcohol testing. She also cannot possess any firearms.
Lauren, 52, previously pleaded not guilty to charges she willfully fired at several police officers who were shouting at her over a fence while searching for hit-and-run suspects allegedly attempting to hide in neighboring backyards in her Eagle Rock neighborhood. No officers were hit, but several fired their own weapons during the chaotic scene captured on video.
According to the LAPD, Lauren racked her gun and fired it during the alleged standoff with officers who were on the other side of a fence, searching for the hit-and-run suspects. Body-worn camera and home-surveillance video released by the LAPD on YouTube showed the minutes leading up to the shooting.
In the nearly 22-minute compilation, multiple officers are heard repeatedly yelling at a woman, instructing her to drop her gun. The woman is not seen or heard in the video recorded by the officers. The fence was too high for the height of the officers’ body-worn cameras, and the scene appeared hectic, with the loud drone of a police helicopter overhead. Toward the end of the exchange, one officer identifies himself as “police” while another shouts that he’s with the California Highway Patrol. It’s not clear if the officers’ uniforms could be seen over the fence.
A separate video from Lauren’s home-surveillance system, also released by the LAPD, gives a different perspective. It shows Lauren exiting her house holding a black handgun and walking around the perimeter. The video appears to show Lauren manipulating and firing the gun, but it’s recorded from a distance and has no sound. After appearing to slightly recoil, Lauren walks away, looking relatively calm.
According to the police footage, as soon as an officer warned, “Oh, she racked it,” police opened fire, unloading a barrage of ear-splitting shots. Oddly, in her home-surveillance video, Lauren does not appear to react to the volley of shots or exhibit any injury in the seconds after she allegedly fired.
About an hour after the shooting, Lauren exited her home and was arrested without incident. She was taken to a hospital for treatment of a gunshot wound to her arm. She was later booked on suspicion of attempted murder and released on $1 million bail. Prosecutors ultimately charged her with firing a gun with gross negligence and assault with a semiautomatic firearm.
In a 911 call also released by police, someone inside Lauren’s home can be heard telling an operator that Lauren was apparently shot by one of the suspects of the manhunt. Lauren is heard talking in the background, explaining what happened. “I had my gun, and he said, ‘Put down that gun. Put down that gun.’ I said, ‘Put down your fucking gun.’ And then he shot me,” Lauren says in the call released by the LAPD. “There are three men out at the other side of this fence here.”
According to police, investigators recovered a 9mm Glock handgun and a spent shell casing from Lauren’s residence.
Lauren, who has not commented publicly on the shooting, released her first memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, in 2010, and her second, Everything You Ever Wanted, in May 2015. A few days after the incident, Shriner performed with Weezer at Coachella.
