Blood of Slain Teen Informant Could Be on Police Hands Too

How 17-year-old Chad MacDonald Jr. died a month ago isn’t the mystery. He was found, strangled, in a Los Angeles alley, presumably after a drug deal went south.

We know that much only because a girlfriend who was with him survived being shot in the face and dumped off the highway to help the cops arrest two of the three suspects a few days later.

Knowing the cause of death only raised another question: How did this Yorba Linda teen’s life get so far off the track that he ended up dead in an alley?

The simple answer is that he got mixed up in the drug business. Friends and relatives concede that Chad’s life had taken a bad detour, but say he wasn’t a bad boy. Only in the final months before his death, they say, did Chad stray.

In that sense, he wasn’t unique. Lots of teenagers get caught up in the drug scene.

Not many of them, however, get caught up in being an undercover agent.

And that is where the real mystery of Chad MacDonald’s death gets more tightly wound.

MacDonald family attorney Lloyd Charton says, flat out, that Chad’s undercover work for the Brea Police Department led to his death. Charton is not Orange County’s most understated attorney, but he asserts that MacDonald’s last stop before his death was at a drug den in Norwalk and that his killers got wise to his undercover work.

Brea Police Chief William C. Lentini discounts that but acknowledges that the department enlisted Chad to make an undercover drug buy at an Anaheim house in mid-January as a way of mitigating his arrest on drug charges about 10 days earlier. That buy, which Chad carried out, was his only foray with Brea police, Lentini insists. Anything MacDonald did after that was his own doing, the chief says.

Even if the chief is right, he’s wrong.

Hindsight is indeed 20-20. Unfortunately, there’s nothing like a dead body in an alley to show us with perfect clarity just how misguided it is to use kids as cops.

It may have looked foolproof to let Chad play narc. The cops had him by the scruff of the neck on the drug charge, and he was willing to do their bidding. Maybe the cops do that a lot with teenagers. Maybe it works every time.

Not this time.

No matter what they say, the cops can’t be completely sure that they don’t have some blood on their hands.

The chief may be able to say with complete honesty that he didn’t dispatch Chad to that Norwalk home. I accept his word on that, but what he can’t know is what was going on in Chad’s mind when he went. For all anyone knows, the chief included, Chad may have been caught up in the moment and had decided to play this narc business for all it was worth.

Maybe the kid thought he was going to impress somebody with a big score. How far-fetched is it for a kid to fantasize about walking into the detective bureau with a couple grams of speed and wait for the kudos to come his way?

Of course, that may have been the furthest thing from MacDonald’s mind. Maybe he just went to Norwalk to perpetuate his fledgling drug career.

The problem is, we don’t know.

And neither do the police.

Do police, for instance, know for sure that Chad didn’t get a buzz from his first bust? Do they know for sure that, once he got into the thrill-and-deception game that is undercover work, he hadn’t felt like he’d found his natural calling?

Do the police know just how stable Chad MacDonald was at that point in his life? As friends and relatives said at his funeral, something seriously wrong had been going on in recent months. Did police know that? Did they do a psychological profile on MacDonald to determine if he was narc material?

The fact that police now are saying MacDonald returned, on his own, to the drug scene only confirms that he was a bad recruit in the first place.

And this doesn’t even address the possibility, however remote, that something could have gone wrong from the job that police admit to giving MacDonald. What if he’d been killed as a result of his January buy for police?

That’s why the police can’t win this one. That’s what can happen when you use informants who aren’t even old enough to vote.

With suspects in custody and a surviving witness, maybe we’ll get some answers. Maybe MacDonald was killed just for the hell of it. Maybe he tried to rip off his connection. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder if his “business associates” didn’t get wind of his undercover past and act as gangsters do.

About 15 years ago there was a prison riot in New Mexico, and inmates got keys to the cellblock where the informants were quartered. Cell by cell they went, and what they did to them wasn’t pretty.

Crooks don’t like snitches and undercover cops. That’s why, in the midst of the boredom that sometimes goes with it, the job is dangerous. It isn’t for amateurs.

And it surely isn’t for kids.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com