A man who brutally murdered a gay Vietnam War veteran in 2002 and then lived with his corpse for a month was granted a generous plea deal by then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, infuriating the community at the time. Ta.
Gary Lee Oberver met murderer James McKinnon at a San Francisco bar and took him to his Glen Park apartment. After a scuffle, McKinnon stabbed Ober to death.
As Ober's body rotted in the bathtub, McKinnon covered it with baking soda to mask the smell. When Ober's neighbor, Stephanie Henry, called for him, a well-dressed McKinnon came to the door and told her he was on a $7,000 Walt Disney Cruise trip that Ober had won. SF Gate reported at that time.
“I'm still healing,” Henry told the Post this week, recalling the day she looked through her peephole and noticed flies buzzing around her door. Eventually, the fire department was notified.
“[The firemen] I broke the window and went in, and he came out. [the firefighter] It was white as snow,” she recalled.
“There were swarms of maggots. There were millions of maggots,” Henry recalled. “If my mother hadn't supported me, I probably would have been in the hospital for about a week.”
In his jailhouse confession, McKinnon said he acted in self-defense, but reports say this claim was undermined by the fact that Ober suffered from a back problem that made it difficult for him to walk. They say it's a lie. Local Bay Area reporter.
When Kamala Harris became president in 2004, she promised to get tough on crime, but inherited a case backlog from her predecessor, Terrence Hallinan. One of them was the McKinnon case.
In 2005, three years after the murder, Harris arrested McKinnon on voluntary manslaughter charges and agreed to a plea deal that resulted in a time-limited sentence of six years in prison. The deal also allowed Mr. McKinnon to avoid the elder abuse charges he also faced.
McKinnon was freed just two years later. He secured parole in 2007.
Elliott Beckelman, the assistant prosecutor who handled the case, told the Post that “gay panic” was a factor in his decision to go easy on him.
“His defense was sexual provocation,” Beckelman recalled. “Unfortunately, it was prevalent 20 or 25 years ago, and it wasn't an uncommon defense back then…I don't have any regrets about how this happened.”
Kamala Harris defended the plea deal, saying at the time, “I support the attorneys,” and “every case is different and has different facts and circumstances.”
Those close to Mr. Ober disagreed.
“I'm just shocked…this man is a threat,” Ober's friend Frank Franco told a local newspaper at the time. “I can't believe it. That's beyond me. It wasn't manslaughter. It was just a blatant, out-of-place murder. I thought this bitch was going to go to prison for the rest of her life. This prosecutor. What were the officials thinking? I can't believe it.
Henry, who still lives in San Francisco, not far from the murder scene, said she remains troubled by Harris' decision and, while not a fan of Donald Trump, cannot support the Democratic presidential candidate.
“I was really hurt when it came to Kamala Harris. I was hurt then and I'm hurt now,” Henry said. “If I hadn't gone through this horrible situation in my life, I would have voted for her.”
Charles Moran, president of Log Cabin Republicans, a coalition of LGBT Republicans, called the incident a tragedy.
“LGBT voters will be interested in hearing Ms. Harris try to defend herself, but that will require her to interview reporters who are not rooting for her,” he said. “Kamala Harris spent her entire campaign hiding from the real record, and this tragically unjust incident is yet another reminder of why.”
The newspaper was unable to reach McKinnon for comment. Harris' campaign declined to comment.
