Farrah Fawcett’s son, Redmond O’Neal, has been ordered to stay in custody at a state hospital following his 2018 arrest for attempted murder.
Us Weekly can confirm a Los Angeles court commissioner ruled on Thursday, June 25, that there is sufficient cause to believe a crime had been committed based on the evidence. As a result, the case against O’Neal, 38, will move forward.
After multiple witnesses testified, L.A. County Superior Court Commissioner James P. Cooper, who presided over the preliminary hearing that started in December 2025, concluded that the 13 felony and misdemeanor charges still stand against Redmond, whom Fawcett shared with Ryan O’Neal.
Redmond has been remanded without bail to the custody of Patton State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in San Bernardino, California, where he has been housed for over three years following his arrest for attempted murder and assault after an attempted robbery. Bail will be heard by a trial judge at his next court date on July 9.
“I have to determine if [Redmond] is connected to the alleged misconduct,” Cooper said at the preliminary hearing. “There is sufficient evidence on each charge to say that he is connected to the alleged misconduct. Have the People established sufficient evidence to support the elements of the offense? There has been.”
He added: “I’m not making any decisions on whether or not there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. O’Neal did in fact have the intent to kill. That’s for a jury to decide.”
One witness, LAPD Detective Carlos Carisa, told the court that when Redmond was arrested in May 2018 for robbery at a 7-Eleven in Santa Monica, California, he provided a brief statement to police and waived his Miranda rights.
The detective claimed he asked the clerk for a mobile phone before they got “feisty” and both started “antagonizing each other.” When Redmond was locked out, he pushed the glass doors open and allegedly said that he “had bad thoughts in his head about what he’d do to the clerk.” He also “asked him for money as opposed to attacking or killing him.”
In May 2018, Redmond was implicated in a series of unprovoked, violent confrontations in the Venice Beach and Palms neighborhoods of Los Angeles, including multiple stabbings and a convenience store robbery. The Los Angeles County District Attorney charged him with multiple counts of felonies and misdemeanors, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, criminal threats, brandishing a knife and battery. He was also charged with drug possession.
In court on Thursday, Redmond was seen smiling and blowing a kiss to his godmother, Mela Murphy. His lawyer Dana Cole requested to continue the preliminary hearing for several weeks so the defense could call a psychologist as a witness regarding Redmond’s “mental state with respect to this so-called crime spree.”
The request was denied because any evidence would be “irrelevant” for specific felony charges, with Cooper adding, “It would not negate the element of general intent and irrelevant on all misdemeanor counts.”
The commissioner noted, “[The] testimony would only be circumstantial evidence because his therapist] didn’t observe any of the alleged misbehavior. Also her information is secondhand.”
Cooper then pointed to the injuries that victim Seth Folkerson sustained when Redmond allegedly stabbed him five times in 2018.
“The doctors saved his life. If the doctors weren’t so good, he would have been dead. He was in the hospital for several months on life support. There is enough evidence to support an inference for intent to kill,” Cooper said. “It is sufficient for prelim[inary] purposes to make a finding that when a person has those kind[s] of injuries … in the neck and torso that are designed to inflict fatality that is sufficient to support circumstantial evidence of an intent to kill.”
Cooper explained that he was “not even deciding if Mr O’Neal is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and if he is guilty beyond a preponderance of evidence,” considering that is not the standard for a preliminary hearing. “A trial is at a different stage because a jury has to make certain findings,” he added.
In court, the detective testified that he observed red rashes on Redmond’s forehead and the tip of his nose at the time of the robbery arrest, along with a “5250” tattoo on cheek, a rash on right earlobe, tattoos on his arms including “Understand Me” and deep lacerations on his right thumb.
Redmond’s criminal case was put on hold after a judge ruled in 2019 that he was incompetent to stand trial. According to reports, he was evaluated and diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Earlier this year, he was deemed mentally competent to stand trial, and he pleaded not guilty in March.
“No one is taking my kid away,” Murphy, who was Fawcett’s longtime friend and hairstylist and also acts as Redmond’s conservator, told Us after storming out of the courtroom as the commissioner gave his ruling. “My sleeve always has another trick up it.”
Redmond’s lawyer, meanwhile, told Us after the ruling: “In a preliminary hearing, the standard of proof is reasonable suspicion. It’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So what the judge did today is of no surprise. We knew [Redmond] was going to be held to answer on these various charges and it’s really the attempted murder count we are most focused on.”
Cole continued: “Everything else, he’s sort of already done his time to be quite honest. They are claiming it’s first degree. We are claiming if it’s anything, it would be second [degree], not first. We still have a long way to go in this case. There is a whole mental health overlay. And that is going to be very important in deciding how ultimately this case gets resolved.”
While no bail was set on Thursday, the issue could be heard at Redmond’s next hearing.
“There are a lot of things we can address in front of the next judge,” Cole noted. “The issue of bail, whether he should be moved from Patton State Hospital to a private setting. We have a right to set bail, it’s just I don’t want to set bail until I know where I would put him where he would be safe and have structure and supervision because I think that would be very important.”
Cole told Us that Redmond is “doing very well,” saying, “He’s sort of used to his environment there [at Patton], at least for the time being, and now our hope is at some point people will see that the time he has spent on [what is] alleged to be a crime spree has now been served and that we need to go to the next level, which is to focus on his mental health as opposed to his incarceration.”
Before the hearing concluded, Cooper addressed Redmond as the bailiff prepared to take him out of the courtroom.
“Mr. O’Neal, we never met, but I remember you as a little boy at Pro Gym in Brentwood, [California],” Cooper recalled. “[It was] your dad’s and mother’s gym. And the people that used to go to the gym we had a phrase … for all the little weights that were around the gym. We said, ‘Oh, those are Redmond’s weights.’ I’m just saying that it’s a small world and good luck, sir.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.usmagazine.com ’
