Anatomy of a Murder Tragic and Senseless Loss of a Ragamuffin Good Samaritan May 2006

by Tamara Autentico
Photos by Russell Byrne

My son, Morgan Maghuyop, was born May 2, 1985. From the beginning he was an open, friendly boy. He was very social and people were drawn to him. I took him with me to college when he was only two years old. My fellow college students would come to the door of our college housing and ask, “Can Morgan come out to play?” That kid got along with everyone.

A Head for Business
Along with his social nature, Morgan also had the soul of an entrepreneur. In second grade he began trading POGS and baseball cards. He studied the subject of trading cards and became a young expert. One day he bought a rookie card off of a schoolmate for ten bucks. That night the boy showed up at our door with his father. The dad told me that the baseball card was far more valuable than the ten dollars Morgan had paid for it. “What do you want me to do?” I asked the man, “My son took the time to learn the value of what he was dealing with and your kid didn’t.”

The father said, “You’re right! This will be a learning experience for my son.”

In sixth grade Morgan went to a Planned Parenthood meeting where they were giving out bags of condoms with 50 condoms to a bag. Morgan took two bags and began selling the condoms to his schoolmates for a buck a piece. He had already made about 70 dollars before the principal took him into her office and called me. She told me at the end of the conversation, “Well, I have to admit that he’s promoting safe sex, but we can’t encourage this.”

A Troubled Good Samaritan
Morgan had a compassionate heart and would often defend children from bullies. One young boy was being bullied by a larger boy who kept shouting that the little boy smelled like pee. Morgan finally grew tired of the harassment. Even though the bully was a grade ahead and much bigger, Morgan nailed the punk in the head with a basketball, distracting his attention so that he could administer a proper attitude adjustment.

We moved to Antioch Middle School, where the kids were from rough neighborhoods. Morgan found the roughest and toughest and from them learned about a world populated by people who were less fortunate than himself.

Morgan began to turn to his own paths. His classwork began to suffer; it was learned that his brain processed numbers differently from his classmates. As he grew older he developed an aversion to school and couldn’t understand why he should attend.

Part of Morgan’s problems stemmed from his inability to get along with his stepfather. He was never really defiant but simply lacked the important father figure that his stepfather and his biological father failed to provide for him.

When Morgan was in the ninth grade he decided to drop out of school. I tried to  bribe him by offering to buy him a bass boat if he would change his mind. His response was, “If I want a bass boat, I’ll just buy it for myself.” I tried to set some boundaries for him by promoting the principle, “If you are in my house; you will live by my rules.” His response was to leave my house. I thought he would come back, but he didn’t.

Morgan began running around with boys with limited life-chances. I found it curious that my son was willing to turn his back on all the advantages of our middle-class lifestyle and to identify himself with people who had been given nothing.

As he began to make a way for himself, Morgan fell in love with a young girl. Her family loved him and took care of him. Later he developed a new love and ended up living out of his car, while taking care of his girlfriend, her mother, aunt, and her aunt’s two kids – paying the cost of the two hotel rooms the family was living in.

Morgan was living on his energy and his entrepreneurial spirit. One of his hustles was to buy cars and “flip them.” He would buy cars from auction or salvage yards, clean them up, and sell them on the street.

A Fatal Encounter
A guy named Mark Bailey gave Morgan a place to stay. One day an acquaintance stole Morgan’s car together with all his personal belongings. Two weeks after the theft Morgan ran into the guy in Antioch. “Where’s my car?” Morgan asked.

“It’s in Bay Point,” the man replied.

Morgan and a couple of his friends went with the man to Bay Point to a place called River Shore Apartments and pulled into a stall. Then while Morgan’s friends stayed in the car the man took Morgan to his car. However, after they had walked around the corner the friends heard three gunshots. The first missed Morgan, striking the hood of his car, and lodging in the windshield washer fluid reservoir. The next shots struck him in the back killing him instantly.

Everything Morgan had in that car had been ripped off. The killer was afraid of what was going to happen when Morgan found his stuff missing. He decided to get Morgan before Morgan got him.

That was November 13, 2003.

The murder was such a senseless deed of violence! I wanted to grab that guy by the front of his shirt lapels and shout at him, “You never knew my son or you would have known that he wouldn’t have held a grudge against you! He just wanted his car back!” My son had been shot in the back by a coward who really had nothing to fear.

Morgan’s death affected a lot of lives. My son had some rough spots in his life, but he was a good human being. His funeral was not widely announced in the media – the announcement in the paper simply referred to him as “a transient” – but 700 people showed up. Police officers out of uniform came as well as his vice principal. Members from rival gangs showed up to pay their final respects.

Many people have told stories about what Morgan did. “He was always there for me,” is a comment I got from many people. “He was loyal to a fault,” people said. Morgan was everybody’s friend.

Travesty of Justice
I’m sure that I know who shot and killed my son. He got away with murder.

It seems that the personnel from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department made a terrible error. They set a dog to tracking the scent of the fugitive from the casings left behind. It was reported to us that the detective called off the search dog, figuring that the shooter probably got into a car, even though the dog was still trailing.

The reason why the decision to abandon the search was so serious was because the killer had lived in that neighborhood. The dog might have led the detective right to the suspect if he had been given the chance to do so.

Thirteen days after the killing, when detectives finally picked the man up for questioning, he told two sets of stories. When they charged him with homicide the suspect tried to escape through a vent in the ceiling.

On January 9, 2006, over two years after the murder, a jury was selected. Under oath the man claimed he had been Morgan’s friend; but that wasn’t true. He claimed he was innocent, but he acted guilty. They showed a video of his attempted escape to the jury.

Gunpowder residue had been found on the left sleeve of the coat that he was wearing and he was left-handed.

The accused took the stand and under oath admitted that he had lied about everything except about his innocence.

The trial lasted three weeks. We all had confidence in how the trial went and felt good when the jury went into deliberation, but the 12 jurors deliberated for less than two hours before unbelievably voting for acquittal. We were stunned by the outcome!

After the trial one of the deputy sheriffs who escorted the Jury Foreman to his car told us that the foreman was upset. “We know he was guilty; we wanted more evidence,” he said. I guess they wanted a videotape showing the killer committing the act.

It was an unbelievable miscarriage of justice! County prosecutors don’t take murder cases to trial unless they can win. This was the first one that failed in five years.

The verdict was like a reenactment of the murder for us. It was as though Morgan had died again. Our family has been devastated.

One of the awful things we learned in the trial was that defense attorneys, themselves, are held to no standard of truth when speaking before the court. The killer’s lawyer said awful things about my son – told factual lies, slandered, and demeaned my son’s reputation. That heartless woman put my son on trial rather than the man who had pulled the trigger.

A bright side in all of that was the conduct of Phyllis Redmond, the District Attorney who prosecuted the case. From the beginning Phyllis showed herself to be kindhearted, compassionate, and extremely competent. She was awesome!

Phyllis was as devastated by the innocent verdict as we were, and she is still trying to come to terms with this miscarriage of justice. She told us that she had never felt so compelled to win a trial for the victim’s family. She knew the evidence. She knew that the killer got away with murder. Afterwards she told her husband, “If it feels so awful for me; I can’t imagine what the family is going through!“ For a long time she kept replaying the tape, wondering where she went wrong.

Morgan Maghuyop’s grave still remains one of the cemetery’s most visited sites. Many of his friends still miss him. Every time we go there, whether morning or evening, we always find people at his gravesite. We held a candlelight vigil in November, marking the two-year anniversary of his death, and a crowd of people gathered with us.

In the meantime we continue to try to come to terms with Morgan’s murder. He was just starting to really get his act together. He lost the opportunity to make his mark on the world. Children loved my son. He would have been a great dad!

He was only eighteen years old!
Morgan James Maghuyop
May 2, 1985 – November 13, 2003
A True Warrior with a Heart of Gold