WOMAN FOUND UNFIT FOR TRIAL.

Byline: KAREN MAESHIRO Staff Writer

LANCASTER -- A gun-toting woman shot by sheriff's deputies in a July 21 confrontation outside Palmdale City Hall has been ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Susan Dyer, 43, had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in August after her attorney at the time questioned her mental competencey.

``She was found unfit to be assisting in her own defense,'' Deputy District Attorney Steve Heller said. ``It means she's got some mental issues. She won't be brought back to trial until she is capable of understanding what's going on and to assist in her own defense.''

Defense attorney David Houchin, who has since taken on Dyer's case, said Dyer will be evaluated further. She is still in the hospital recovering from her wounds.

``It's not the best time to go forward,'' Houchin said. ``The case has been suspended temporarily.''

Detectives and city officials said they don't know why Dyer showed up armed at City Hall. A detective who worked on an earlier case suggested she might have been looking for her former parole office, even though the parole office is miles away from City Hall.

Dyer had been involved in at least two similar confrontations with police in Los Angeles and Wisconsin, including one in which she pointed a gun at a Los Angeles SWAT officer after invading the home of a woman who had jilted her.

Once described by a prosecutor as a ``walking time bomb,'' Dyer had been paroled after prison in the late 1990s to Palmdale to keep her away from the Los Angeles woman, and over the past 10 years has been repeatedly in and out of prison and at least twice put into mental institutions, authorities said.

The prosecutor in the Los Angeles case as a result pushed for and succeeded in strengthening California's stalking law.

Dyer was holding two pistols when city maintenance workers saw her before dawn July 21 outside Palmdale City Hall.

When a half-dozen deputies, summoned by the workers' 911 call, ordered Dyer to drop her weapons, she ran into a parking lot, then pointed the guns at the deputies, officials said.

Dyer has been charged in the Palmdale case with assault on a peace officer, grand theft (firearm) and possession of a firearm by a felon, and she has yet to be arraigned.

In 1992, Dyer was sentenced in Los Angeles to seven years in prison after being convicted of brandishing a weapon at a SWAT team officer and assault, with personal use of a gun.

The charges stem from Dyer stalking a woman with whom she had a brief affair, officials said. At one point, Dyer was living in the crawl space beneath the woman's house, though that wasn't discovered until after the SWAT team confrontation.

After finishing her parole in 2000, Dyer left California and ended up in Wisconsin, where she worked as a railroad engineer, officials said. Arrested in 2005 after a high-speed chase, she spent several weeks in a Wisconsin mental hospital, then headed back to California, officials said.

Prosecutors said they last heard Dyer was living out of her car.

karen.maeshiro(at)dailynews.com

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