The 20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20)(69)

“To start, please picture this: At 11:27 on March 15, Officer Todd Morton and his partner, Officer William Scarborough, are driving in the Sunset District on Nineteenth Avenue when a white Chevy Impala speeds through a red light at the intersection of Nineteenth and Taraval.

“Officer Scarborough is at the wheel, and Officer Morton is in the passenger seat. Morton turns on the flashers and sirens, and Scarborough follows the Chevy. Normally, the driver sees the lights and hears the sirens and pulls over.

“But the Chevy’s driver speeds up.

“Officer Morton calls it in, and the police dispatcher tells him that the vehicle in question has been reported stolen. Now the Chevy hits Highway 1 South at ninety-plus miles an hour. Cars are going off the road as they see this car running up on them.

“But there is something the driver of the Chevy doesn’t expect. The vehicle in front of him doesn’t have enough pickup to get out of his way, and now the Chevy is boxed in by the slow-moving car ahead of him and cars streaming past him on both sides.

“Officer Scarborough pulls into the fast lane and makes a hard right in front of the Chevy, road-blocking the lane. The Chevy brakes but skids, hitting the rear compartment of the squad car. Fenders bend, drivers lean on their horns. A simple traffic stop has gone all to hell.”

Leaving that image with the jury, Yuki walked back to her table and returned with a large foam-core board. She turned it so that the jurors could see the attached photos of the white Chevy in various degrees of speeding ahead and burning rubber as it was brought to a halt by the patrol car.

Yuki told the jury, “Officer Scarborough will take us through the entire fifteen-second video, but for now we’ve cut and pasted the relevant frames. See here. This is Officer Morton. He has gotten out of his cruiser with his gun drawn. Officer Scarborough is still behind the wheel. He’s calling for backup and making sure that the dash cam is working.”

Yuki continued laying out the sequence of events.

“Everything is happening very fast,” she said. “The time between when Officer Morton gets out of the cruiser to approach the Chevy and when he is shot measures only fifteen seconds.

“In that brief gasp a good man, a public servant doing his job, dies. His wife becomes a widow, and his three children, fatherless. And the man who shoots him gets away. The defendant knows the shooter’s identity.”

Yuki let that last sentence hang in the air.

“But he’s not talking.”





CHAPTER 100





YUKI WALKED ALONG the rail fronting the jury box, letting the jurors count off the seconds.

Then she asked, “How does the killer get away?

“In the few seconds following the crash and the shooting, the gunman makes a plan. Traffic is now crawling with rubberneckers. The man with the gun steps into the far-right lane, where the driver of a RAV4 is slowing for the accident. The gunman points his weapon at the driver’s open window and shouts, ‘Get out of the car.’

“The driver of the RAV4 is Mr. Jonas Hunt, seventy years old, and he tells Officer Scarborough later on that he wanted to see seventy-one. He complies with the shooter, gets out of his car. The motor is running. The shooter gets into the car, makes a U-turn across a break in the median strip, avoiding the clotted traffic, and makes his escape.

“The cruiser’s dash cam has recorded the Chevy’s plate number, and although every law enforcement officer in California looks for the car, they can’t find it. The RAV4 is found two days later, abandoned in a junkyard. Mr. Hunt cannot describe the carjacker except to say that he was either white or Hispanic and frightening. Mr. Hunt didn’t want to look at his face, and so his description is vague. The carjacker wore gloves, and to date his prints have not been retrieved. The dash-cam view of the shooter is grainy and doesn’t ring any bells with law enforcement software.

“Officer Scarborough can’t identify the shooter, either. He tried. He looked at mug shots and he spoke with a police artist, but he couldn’t make a positive ID. He saw the man from a distance, then he saw him at an angle when he shot Officer Morton, and then when the killer hijacked Mr. Hunt’s car, Officer Scarborough saw him with his back turned.

“But one person does know the shooter’s identity.

“The driver of the stolen white Chevy at the center of this true story. Officer Scarborough arrests him, and after being futilely interrogated, he is incarcerated in the men’s jail. Right now he’s sitting with his attorney at the defense counsel table. His name is Clay Warren and he is the defendant.”

Yuki stopped speaking for a moment and let the jurors get a good look at the teenager facing a life sentence.

Then Yuki said, “Back at the scene of the crime, Officer Scarborough attends to Officer Morton until the ambulance arrives. Sadly, Officer Morton has already passed away.”

Yuki told the jurors that stealing a car is, by law, grand theft of an automobile, a felony.

She said, “The defendant may or may not have known that the car was stolen, or that the shooter had a gun, but guns, licensed or not, must be stored in the trunk or another locked box. This gun was not locked up. It was on the shooter’s person. And that felony is charged against the defendant as an accomplice.

“That’s not all,” Yuki said. “A kilo of high-grade, unadulterated fentanyl was secreted in a suitcase in the trunk of the stolen Chevy—another felony, and another charge against the defendant. As you have seen and I have told you, a police officer making a routine traffic stop was killed during the commission of these crimes. That makes the defendant an accomplice, and just as guilty, under the law, as the shooter.