Glendale Father of Slain Girl Shoots Suspect in S.F. Court

A Glendale man who is an activist on behalf of crime victims stood up in a Hall of Justice courtroom here Thursday and shot and wounded the man accused of killing his daughter.

Police identified the man as John D. (Jack) Spiegelman, 47, founder of a small organization called Justice for Homicide Victims and a vocal opponent of Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird. Spiegelman was briefly investigated by state police last year after aides to Bird complained that Spiegelman had threatened the chief justice in anti-Bird campaign literature.

According to police, Spiegelman was sitting in the front row of Superior Court Judge William Stein’s courtroom listening to testimony in the trial of Daniel David Morgan, accused in the 1983 shooting death of Spiegelman’s daughter in Golden Gate Park, when he stood up and drew a .38-caliber revolver. Spiegelman yelled and fired three shots at Morgan.

One shot grazed the left side of Morgan’s head and the others struck him in the right arm, said a spokeswoman for San Francisco General Hospital, where Morgan, 36, was reported in serious but stable condition.

After the shooting, Spiegelman laid down his weapon and calmly announced, “I give up.” He was booked into jail on suspicion of attempted murder. Police believe Spiegelman sneaked the gun through a metal detector near the courthouse entrance by concealing it in a hollowed-out reference book inside a briefcase.

Spiegelman was interviewed by The Times early last year for an article on crime victims organizations. In the interview, Spiegelman recalled watching television news footage of a father in a Louisiana courthouse shooting the suspected murderer of his child.

“I felt great,” he said, remembering the sight.

“He didn’t have to go through all of that (trial and court procedure). Nothing is going to bring back his daughter. But a tremendous burden has been lifted off of him. It’s what we all want to do, let’s face it.”

At the time of the interview, Spiegelman said he had been working as a cabinetmaker in the San Fernando Valley and also had been a copywriter for an advertising agency.

Helped Form Group

In 1984, Spiegelman helped found a small group called Justice for Homicide Victims, which splintered from the larger organization, Parents of Murdered Children. Spiegelman said he began the new organization because leaders of Parents of Murdered Children declined to become politically active.

“We want our children’s deaths to mean something,” he said. “I just didn’t want to walk away.”

Spiegelman drew attention to himself last April with a campaign flyer in the form of an “open letter” to Bird. It suggested that the chief justice imagine one of her loved ones “lying on the ground with a bullet in their head.”

The letter concluded by saying that Bird’s concept of justice could be changed “with a single bullet.”

At the time, Bird’s campaign organizers denounced the letter as an outrage and a threat. State police investigated the matter but did not press charges.

Feelings of Survivors

Spiegelman said in a separate interview after the letter was distributed that he did not intend to threaten Bird, but rather was pleading that Bird consider the feelings of survivors of murder victims.

Spiegelman and his group distributed the letter at a two-day crime victims’ conference last April in Sacramento, sponsored by Gov. George Deukmejian’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning. Spiegelman was a featured speaker at one of the seminars.

“I don’t know anything about Rose Bird, except that she doesn’t believe in executing,” Spiegelman told The Times last year. “. . . Why is she interfering? People have voted for it. She is misguided.”

In his view, Bird’s defeat should be the main goal of the crime victims’ movement.

Gunshot to the Head

Morgan, the man who was shot Thursday, is on trial in the killing of Sarah Spiegelman, 18, of Mill Valley. Sarah Spiegelman was strolling through Golden Gate Park with a companion, Dwion Gates, 27, of Oakland, when she was killed by a gunshot to the head. Gates also was shot in the attack and was paralyzed.

Police spokesman Ross Laflin said the attack “appeared to be racially involved” because Gates is black and Sarah Spiegelman was white. Morgan is white.

Morgan was found mentally incompetent to stand trial in July, 1983, and was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for medical treatment.

Two years later, he was released from the hospital. He was rearraigned last November.

Spiegelman’s friends said they were stunned by news of the attack, even though they said he had never gotten over the grief of his daughter’s death.

“He was destroyed by it,” said Danielle Charney of Santa Monica.