Son’s Killing a Painful Puzzle

Ann Erickson sometimes parks her car on Oso Parkway near Felipe Road in Mission Viejo and thinks about her 21-year-old son, who, before sunrise one Sunday last February, was shot to death in the middle of the parkway.

“I have sat there and thought, ‘I hope it was fast and he didn’t know it was coming,’ ” she said, her voice breaking.

Erickson said the body of the youngest of her three children, Steven Merritt, was found by sheriff’s deputies after residents in the usually quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood reported hearing four to six gunshots about 3:45 the morning of Feb. 26.

She said she was told that her son had suffered “multiple gunshot wounds.” About half an hour earlier, she said, Merritt had called a roommate to ask for a ride home from a party at a private house on El Retiro in Mission Viejo.

The roommate, Alan Akahoshi, said Merritt didn’t appear at their prearranged meeting spot on the corner of El Retiro and Felipe when he arrived there about 3:30 a.m. After waiting awhile, he said, he returned to the Mission Viejo home he shared with his brother and Merritt, about 2 miles from the party. He said he thought that if Merritt still needed a ride, he would call again.

Erickson said she doubts that her son walked to the place where he was shot, which she said was a mile and a half from where he was to meet Akahoshi and in the wrong direction if he was trying to go home. She said she is “99% sure” he got there in a car.

To date, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department has no witnesses and no suspect in Merritt’s slaying, Lt. Richard J. Olson said. Olson, the department spokesman, refused to discuss any other aspects of the ongoing homicide investigation.

“We have put a lot of effort into the case,” he said.

Frustrated by the mystery of her son’s death, Erickson, a clerk for the South Coast Water District, and other family members have scraped together a $10,000 reward for anyone who provides information that leads to the killer.

“I feel there must be somebody who knows something,” she said.

Erickson, who lives in El Toro, described her son as outgoing and happy. Strong, lean and 6-feet-1, he worked with his older brother as a framer in residential construction. She said he was a 1985 graduate of El Toro High School, where he was a photographer for the yearbook.

“Photography was his big love,” she said. He had planned to take evening photography courses at Orange Coast College this summer.

Erickson said the party that her son attended that night was given for foreign students from Saddleback College. Natalie Meyer, a Saddleback student who had been Merritt’s girlfriend for 2 years, said she didn’t go with him to the party because she was too tired.

By about midnight, Merritt’s friends had left the party, but he decided to stay, Erickson said she was told later. She theorized that he might have become engrossed in conversation with the foreign students, because he enjoyed traveling and hoped to go abroad.

Meyer said she began to worry when Merritt didn’t show up for their lunch date that Sunday. As the day passed with no word from him, Merritt’s mother and girlfriend reported him missing to police and began to call local hospitals and jails.

The young man found slain on Oso Parkway was not identified as Merritt at first because he hadn’t brought his wallet to the party.

Erickson said the Sheriff’s Department notified her at about 7:30 Monday morning.

Victim Had His Money

She said she doesn’t know why anyone would have killed him. “He was not robbed. He had money in his pocket ($36) and his watch on. . . .

“Everyone who knew him loved him,” she said. “We feel it had to be someone he met that night he didn’t know.”

Meyer said that since Merritt’s death, “nothing’s the same. Now I am afraid to go to my car at night in my own driveway. It makes you think it can happen to anybody.”

Erickson said she realizes that finding the person who killed her son “won’t bring him back. But I want some measure of justice. If they could do it to him, they could do it to someone else. . . .

“Steven was my youngest child and he was very special to me. The worst thing is to live with this every day. The heartbreak is unbelievable.”