Taheri-Azar can stand trial

An evaluation finds the suspect in the SUV rampage at UNC-Chapel Hill competent

HILLSBOROUGH -- In March, Mohammed Taheri-Azar was led out of an Orange County courtroom after calling his lawyer a moron and saying he hated Americans and Jews.

On Wednesday, dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, his hair parted on the left, the man accused of driving onto the UNC-Chapel Hill campus last year and striking nine people was deemed competent to stand trial.

He faces nine counts of attempted first-degree murder and nine counts of felonious assault.

After his client's outburst in March, Public Defender James Williams told reporters Taheri-Azar, 24, had a severe mental illness. The judge ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at Dorothea Dix Hospital.

Superior Court Judge Ken Titus opened that evaluation in court Wednesday and said it indicated Taheri-Azar was currently considered competent to stand trial, though that could change.

More than a year has passed since the driving incident on March 3, 2006. Taheri-Azar has had a volatile relationship with his lawyer and family, sometimes cooperating and talking with them and sometimes not.

Initially, he declared he would represent himself. But he refused to submit to a mental health examination that the judge required and chose instead to keep his lawyer.

Taheri-Azar also vacillated between contrition and righteousness in letters written to The Daily Tar Heel.

His changes in temperament also are evident in letters he has written to the court. Two months after the March outburst in court, Taheri-Azar wrote to the court apologizing for his "distasteful conduct."

In that letter, dated May 20, Taheri-Azar also apologized for driving a rented Jeep Cherokee through UNC-CH's Pit area, injuring nine people, though none required overnight hospitalization. Taheri-Azar said he wanted to avenge Muslim deaths, according to police.

"I sincerely regret what I did on that day," he wrote in last month's letter, saying he wished to work for his father's general contracting company in Anaheim, Calif. "Please release me from state custody so that I may pursue my goal of living a productive life in California."