Fatal Deception

Chad MacDonald, a 17-year-old from Yorba Linda, spent the last months of his life playing at the edges, balancing his involvement with illicit drugs against his role as juvenile police snitch.

When he slipped off that edge, the fall was dramatic, resonating far beyond his Orange County neighborhood to spark broad condemnations of the Brea Police Department’s use of juvenile informants and calls in Sacramento for laws banning the practice.

Before MacDonald fell, before he was tortured and killed, before his girlfriend was raped and shot and left for dead in the Angeles National Forest, he appeared to be that most typical of suburban youths, a likable jock who cherished his ride--a white 1991 Nissan pickup.

But he was also, in the last months of his life, living at the center of a net of deceit--as a runner, a go-between, who used his prized truck as a methamphetamine courier service between a Yorba Linda dealer and the dealer’s customers.

Police reports and interviews with many of the troubled young man’s friends and family and his family’s attorney indicate that word was out on the streets of Yorba Linda that if you wanted drugs, particularly meth, MacDonald would be a good person to find. The local high school students knew it. Drug dealers knew it. Even the police knew it.

Which is why, when a Brea traffic cop pulled MacDonald over early Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 6, the officer was interested in more than traffic laws.

“I . . . told MacDonald that his name and vehicle were floating around Yorba Linda as being involved with selling narcotics and asked him if it was true,” the unidentified officer wrote in his report after arresting MacDonald on suspicion of possessing 10.99 grams of meth. (The Brea Police Department is under contract to patrol Yorba Linda.) “MacDonald said that he used to be involved in narcotics a long time ago, but he was now straightened out.”

It wasn’t the last lie MacDonald told. He lied to his mother. He lied to his friends. He lied to the police who agreed to drop the drug possession charges if he turned snitch. He lied to his fellow drug dealers.

In the month since the youth’s battered and strangled body was found in a South Los Angeles alley, the MacDonald family lawyer and police reports have cast him as a youth willing to cut deals to save his own skin while continuing to use the meth that got him into trouble in the first place.

In the last week of his life, as word circulated on Yorba Linda streets that he was cooperating with police, MacDonald stayed away from home, holed up in a motel in Norwalk and made regular visits with his girlfriend to a ramshackle drug house nearby.

Although the family’s lawyer, Lloyd Charton, insists that MacDonald went to the house to set up one last deal for the cops, police reports indicate that Brea police had already dropped him as an informant and were moving forward with criminal drug possession charges against him.

The reason: He wouldn’t stop using meth.

The habit wouldn’t die until he did.

In some ways, the mystery of Chad MacDonald lies not in his death, but in his life, and why he stepped so willingly and fully into the world of drugs.

Father’s Death Shatters Promise of the Future

Chad Allan MacDonald Jr. was born April 7, 1980, to Chad Allan MacDonald Sr. and Cindy Saroli MacDonald, a Detroit couple who staked their future on a move to Southern California.

The promise of that future was shattered just after 2 a.m. March 5, 1981--a month before the baby’s first birthday--when Chad MacDonald Sr., drunk, ran into a light pole less than a mile from home. He was killed and MacDonald’s mother was severely injured, left partially disabled and unable to work.

“[She is] not a well person,” said her brother, Chris Saroli. “She’s paralyzed in her right arm. . . . You would never know it talking to her, but when she’s put under pressure, she cracks.”

Thirteen months after her husband’s death, Cindy MacDonald married Mark L. Shyken. It was a troubled marriage from the start and ended in April 1986, according to court records.

The couple had two sons together. But Shyken’s problems with alcohol and cocaine, which eventually landed him in rehabilitation, led Cindy MacDonald to seek restraining orders against him, in part because he exposed their children to drugs, she charged in court filings.

Shyken, who family members said has turned his life around, did not respond to requests for an interview. His relatives declined further comment.

Chad MacDonald, Saroli said, was acutely aware that Shyken wasn’t his father. “I think it bothered him more than he let on,” Saroli said. “He knew in his heart that he didn’t have a dad. That true bond was missing in Chad’s life. . . . [Shyken] cared for Chad, I believe that, but [Shyken] went down another road.”

Through it all, Cindy MacDonald and her boys remained close to her side of the family, a rambunctious crew known for sloppy kisses and bearhugs, Saroli said.

But there was darkness in the home too.

Police picked up MacDonald a month before his ninth birthday over an unspecified vandalism incident, records show. Police also reported finding him at an under-age drinking party in 1995, when he was 15.

Cindy MacDonald started noticing changes in her son last summer, around the time her father suffered three heart attacks, family lawyer Charton said. The grandfather survived, but his illness had a profound effect on MacDonald.

“He went into a deep depression,” Charton said. “Reflecting back, [Cindy] thinks that’s what caused the depression that led to the drugs.”

Friends, though, said MacDonald was already involved with drugs. They said that last fall he began using meth more often and lost about 20 pounds over the winter.

‘I Will Do Anything to Correct My Mistakes’

It didn’t take MacDonald long to decide that the best way to get out of the January drug bust was to do a little work for the police.

Police reports say MacDonald began cooperating as he was being booked, acknowledging that he used and sold meth.

“I will do anything to correct my mistakes,” the reports quote MacDonald as saying, prompting an officer to ask if he would cooperate in identifying the supplier.

The reports say that MacDonald agreed then to work with drug investigators and that his mother signed a permission form when she picked him up. Saroli contends that police took advantage of his sister.

“They forced her to do something she couldn’t even really understand the full consequences of,” he said. “She trusted them, and they let her down.”

Over the next week, MacDonald and Brea Police Det. James Griffin spoke several times about setting up a drug purchase at a suspected drug house near Esperanza High in Anaheim. On Jan. 15, after police wired MacDonald with a fake pager, he bought meth from a woman at the house. Police raided the house a few days later, but no drugs were found and no arrests were made.

MacDonald continued to feed information to the police while cutting his own deals on the side, using his arrangement to explain to his mother why he was out late so often, police reports say.

Justin Wright, 18, a former classmate, said in an interview that he was a passenger in MacDonald’s truck around that time and watched him sell drugs to a walk-up customer in a parking lot.

“We were just sitting there, and I looked over and he was counting all of this money,” Wright said. “I was, like, ‘Whoa, dude, what’s up with that?’ and he just said something about business being good.”

MacDonald’s juggling act began crumbling Feb. 19, the day he appeared in court on charges relating to the Jan. 6 arrest, a tactic police were using to pressure MacDonald. The hearing was delayed 30 days to give the teenager more time to help set up one more bust.

About 7:30 that night, a Brea police officer noticed a white Nissan pickup following a car too closely. He pulled the pickup over and found MacDonald behind the wheel and in possession of 2 grams of methamphetamine and a small amount of marijuana. MacDonald told the officer that he was trying to find a phone to call Det. Griffin because he had just bought the drugs as an informant.

“MacDonald seemed very nervous and jittery,” the officer wrote.

The youth’s handlers told the officer that they had no knowledge of the buy, and to arrest him. There, on the side of the road, MacDonald was told that he was done working as an informant because he had violated their agreement, police reports say. He was released that night to his mother.

Youth Is Called a ‘Snitch’ at Party

The teenager was now in more trouble than he could know.

Within a few days of the second arrest, MacDonald left home for Norwalk, making daily visits with a male friend to the drug house, according to lawyer Charton. MacDonald mailed a note to his mother saying that “he was trying to straighten his life around, he got a job and was going to school,” police records say.

Charton said the friend told him that MacDonald kept saying he needed to “do one more buy.” But the friends were also on a three-day party binge.

A familiar face showed up--the woman who earlier sold MacDonald meth at the Orange County drug house, which had led to the unsuccessful police raid, Charton said.

“[She] told all of those gang members that Chad was the little [expletive] who narcked on her,” Charton said. Two people pulled guns as MacDonald furiously denied that he was working with police, Charton said, adding: “They thought they were dead right there.” But the confrontation eased under MacDonald’s emphatic denials.

MacDonald returned to the motel early Sunday, March 1, and slept through the day. His girlfriend, 16, showed up at the motel that afternoon and spent the night, Charton said, adding that the youth, accompanied by the girl, went back to the house Monday to do more drugs.

While they were partying, Charton said, Florence Lela Noriega, 28, walked up to the girlfriend and punched her in the face before turning to MacDonald and calling him a “snitch.” Two men--identified by police as Michael Lucas Martinez, 21, and Jose Alfredo Ibarra, 19--jumped MacDonald and began beating him, Charton said. (Noriega and Martinez have been arrested, and Ibarra is a fugitive.)

That morning, the girlfriend’s mother called police to report her missing. About 24 hours later a motorist spotted the girl near the San Gabriel Reservoir. She had been raped, shot and left for dead.

That afternoon Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies called Cindy MacDonald to tell her about the girl. She hadn’t seen her son for five days, and at the suggestion of deputies filed a missing person’s report, the police reports say. It would be another day before investigators connected the body found in South Los Angeles to her missing son.

Police asked Cindy MacDonald why she didn’t file the report sooner. “Mrs. MacDonald said,” the report states, “because this has happened before.”

Times researcher Sheila A. Kern and staff writer Tina Daunt contributed to this story.