Theresa Colosi sits in Santa Barbara County Jail without bail, accused of attempted murder and kidnapping. On top of that, this morning, the court granted two restraining orders against her, keeping her from contacting or being within 100 yards of four people, one of them her 12-year-old son. Her attorney, Robert Sanger, had petitioned the court to allow bail, but he withdrew the request during this morning’s hearing. The paper trail of that petition, however, lays out the details on how an orthopedic surgeon came to be accused of serious crimes.
Colosi left her medical practice in San Jose to move to Santa Ynez after the boy’s father, also an orthopedic surgeon, moved to Santa Barbara in 2018. Their son was born in 2007, but by 2010, his parents’ custody battle had become so “turbulent,” according to the District Attorney’s Office, that it required a special master to hash out the parents’ differences. Along the way, the DA’s papers state, Colosi lost custody entirely in March 2017; the filing cited several instances in which she’d either kept or intercepted her son, “willfully disregarding” court orders. She was allowed three-hour supervised visits twice a week.
One of those took place on December 8, 2019, in Goleta. Colosi met her son and the court-appointed visit supervisor at a coffee shop; then they agreed to go to Zodo’s Bowling & Beyond. Colosi had originally wanted to meet in a “rural and remote location,” but the supervisor felt uneasy about that, given how unhappy Colosi was with the visitation setup. The doctor had said she “can’t go on like this. I can’t do this anymore,” the DA’s opposition to bail states. After the trio parked, Colosi wanted to talk, so the supervisor told the boy to go ahead into the bowling alley, but Colosi told him to stay with them. About five minutes into the conversation, the supervisor related, she noticed Colosi holding a SodaStream oxygen cylinder in her hand. When Colosi shouted to the boy to get in her car, she turned her head to look. According to the court filing, Colosi slammed the cylinder atop her skull and then into the woman’s forehead and nose. Though Colosi tried to grab her son, the boy ran into the bowling alley.