Guilty Verdict in 20-Year-Old Killing

A jury moved Tuesday to close the book on one of Orange County’s bloodiest murder cases, convicting a man for a 1980 bar shooting spree that left a Garden Grove police officer dead and four people wounded.

John George Brown’s retrial lasted less than a month but is only the latest chapter in a 20-year legal odyssey that has left the Garden Grove Police Department and the officer’s family and friends frustrated. The new trial has rekindled their painful memories of the shooting.

“Certainly this was a very sad event they had to live through again,” Garden Grove Police Capt. Dave Abrecht said of the officers involved in the 1980 arrest attempt that ended in a hail of .22 caliber bullets.

The widow and niece of slain officer Donald Reed wept quietly as the court’s clerk read the verdict. Reed’s parents, Keith and Rita Reed, stared blankly at the back of Brown’s head.

Brown, 51, who spent 15 years on death row after his original 1982 conviction, sat quietly in a wheelchair, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He is in ill health, according to his attorneys, but they would not elaborate.

According to authorities, Brown shot and killed 27-year-old Reed while he and three fellow officers tried to arrest Brown on drug and assault warrants in a bar on Garden Grove Boulevard. Two other officers and two bar patrons were also wounded.

The California Supreme Court in 1998 ordered a new trial or a reduced finding of second-degree murder because potentially mitigating evidence was not introduced in the original trial.

During the retrial, victims recounted the horrific scene at the Cripple Creek Salon as Brown opened fire with a pistol he had hidden in his jacket.

Paul McInerny, now a sergeant with the Garden Grove Police Department, was the only officer not wounded. He testified during the trial that Brown at first appeared to be cooperating, but as Brown and the officers were leaving the bar, McInerny heard what he thought were firecrackers. He then saw Reed laying fatally wounded just outside the door.

After a manhunt, police found Brown two hours later hiding in a bush near the bar. He was convicted in 1982 and sent to death row.

But at issue during his appeal was a blood test performed by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department that showed Brown may have taken PCP, a hallucinogenic drug. The test result was never forwarded to Brown’s defense attorneys.

The Supreme Court ruled that the test could have swayed jurors into believing that the murder was not premeditated.

In the Santa Ana courtroom Tuesday, McInerny and three younger Garden Grove Police officers watched the proceedings. They declined to talk to reporters later, but Abrecht said the whole department has been following the trial closely.

“It kind of jolts you about the realities of the job,” he said. The department has lost five officers in the line of duty since 1959, a relatively large number for an agency its size. “Fortunately, justice has prevailed,” Abrecht said.

Tuesday, Brown was convicted for Reed’s murder and the attempted murder on the two other officers. He was convicted of assault charges for the wounding of the two patrons in 1982. Given time already served, the assault counts were not an issue in the new trial.

The jury of six men and six women will now decide whether Brown should again face the death penalty for the crime. The penalty phase is scheduled to begin Monday.