Latino family in St. Louis criticizes judge's decision to put their attacker on house arrest

A Mexican-American family living in St. Louis are deeply concerned about their safety after learning that a hammer-wielding woman who threatened them last year with racist threats outside their home was released from jail and transferred to house arrest.

The family expressed concerns specifically because their assailant previously said she would return, although court records reveal the presiding judge ordered her to have no contact with the victims.

“We’re stressed,” Fatima Suarez, 22, said in a TikTok post after learning that Judy Ann Kline was released on bond last week.

“I don’t agree that they allowed her to be on house arrest because she clearly, she showed and she even said that she’s going to come back.” 

Kline, 54, had her sentence behind bars converted to house arrest with a GPS monitoring device that confines her to her residence, with exceptions for legal, medical, religious exceptions.

The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office prosecuted Kline with three felonies in February including first-degree property damage, first-degree burglary, and unlawful use of a weapon in connection with a break-in at the Suarez residence Jan. 5, 2022.

Suarez said her younger sister, then 4, and her father were in their house when Kline broke a window in their basement and unlawfully entered their home.

Her younger sister was startled by noises in the basement and when her father went to check on what was happening, he encountered Kline rushing upstairs with a hammer.

Suarez said her father quickly closed the door to try and keep Kline confined to the basement and took  his daughter out of the house immediately.

The incident, which was captured on video depicts Kline shouting prejudiced comments targeting the Suarez family’s Mexican ancestry such as, “Get out, you’re a bunch of illegals, you don’t belong on American property!”

She also asserted that the residence was hers and said she wanted to see documentation from the property appraiser to prove they really lived there.

“I know you didn’t buy this house, you don’t have enough money!” she asserted.

Suarez has since uploaded videos of Kline to the Internet to prove she returned to harass the family five more times. Kline was also captured on video trying to pick the family’s front door lock in March last year.

The Suarez family moved into the home six years ago, but public records obtained by NBC Latino reveal Kline was “affiliated with the family’s home in the 1990s.”

Suarez told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the family moved into the home six years ago.

“We had never seen her in our lives,” Suarez told the Dispatch. “She doesn’t live around the neighborhood.”

Court records reportedly also suggest Kline was deemed “incapacitated/disabled” and placed under guardianship and conservatorship from 2006 to 2017.

“You don’t deserve to be out AT ALL,” Suarez wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post, a screenshot of which she later uploaded to TikTok.

“YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO HURT MY DAD AND BABY SISTER… I’m tired of how the justice system is.”