In the trial of John Dungan, a Santa Barbara man charged with murdering a Solvang woman and her two children on Highway 154 in October 2019, the defense rested its case without calling Dungan to the stand.
Before resting, the defense called two witnesses, the first being Dr. Adham Malaty, a private psychiatrist who has been affiliated with Cottage Hospital since 2017. Malaty testified to examining Dungan at the hospital on November 3, 2019, a little more than a week after the collision on October 25 but said he couldn’t specifically remember the encounter.
After reviewing his reports, Malaty said he was unable to determine if Dungan or his actions were suicidal but that there were “a lot of red flags.” One of those red flags was the note the defendant left in his mother’s car, which the doctor referred to as a “suicide letter,” and another being a call from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office advising the hospital about Dungan’s history of having crisis intervention called on him multiple times.