L.A. Teacher Held in Fatal 1989 O.C. Shooting

A first-year Belmont High School math teacher has been arrested in connection with a 1989 killing in Mission Viejo, an unsolved case reopened last year by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Mark Glen Morales, 33, of Burbank was being held Thursday in the Orange County Jail in the fatal shooting of 21-year-old Steven Hall Merritt, who was walking from a party of community college students 11 years ago when he was shot.

Detectives questioned Morales three times the week of the killing, but he left the country soon afterward, officials said. He returned about four years ago.

Picking up the case 1 1/2 years ago, two sheriff’s detectives who specialize in unsolved homicides interviewed about 50 people, persuading some previously reluctant witnesses to provide crucial details that implicated Morales, said Det. Brian Heaney.

“People at the time did not tell the truth,” Heaney said. “But with the passage of time, the burden of knowledge weighs on them.”

Morales, who had earned a temporary teaching credential and taught math to ninth-graders at Belmont near downtown Los Angeles, had made strides to get his life on track in the years since the shooting, authorities said.

“He was leading a relatively normal life,” Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona said. “He married three months ago.”

Merritt’s killing followed a party Morales threw at his parents’ Mission Viejo home, attended by more than 100 people, detectives said. Merritt and half a dozen friends reportedly crashed the party.

The evening turned hostile, officials said, when one of Merritt’s friends made fun of the salsa music Morales was playing and asked that rock music be played. Detectives allege that Morales became increasingly disturbed by the gate-crashers, who left after an hour. Merritt, however, remained behind, flirting with a friend of Morales’, authorities said.

About 3 a.m., Merritt began walking to a nearby spot where a friend had agreed to pick him up. Morales allegedly followed in a car with the lights off. Morales confronted Merritt and somehow got him into his car, detectives said, before the two drove about a mile, got out and scuffled, whereupon Merritt was shot.

His family offered a $10,000 reward for information, but it had little effect. “I’m still shocked” about the arrest, said Ann Erickson, the victim’s mother, of Lake Forest. “I’ve been praying for this for 11 years.”

She described the 1985 graduate of El Toro High School who dreamed of being a photographer as “a wonderful, wonderful boy.”

When Heaney and his partner, Larry Pool, reopened the case, they began looking hard at Morales. They reviewed telephone records and documents from Saddleback College, which many of the party guests had attended. The detectives found new witnesses and persuaded others to finally talk about that evening.

“It was no single piece of evidence that led to the arrest but a large jigsaw puzzle,” Carona said, citing forensic evidence and witnesses.

About 10 p.m. Wednesday, nearly three dozen deputies from Los Angeles and Orange counties arrested Morales as he left a Sherman Oaks store with his wife. Authorities had feared he might flee.

Belmont High Principal Ignacio Garcia said Morales had passed a thorough background check before he was hired last August.

“We are very struck by the news, and surprised,” said Garcia, who described Morales as an outgoing and popular teacher. “He was a good classroom manager . . . interested in doing a good job.”

Dan Isaacs, assistant superintendent in the L.A. Unified School District, said: “The personnel division is monitoring the situation. If he’s charged, we’ll take appropriate action. Right now, it’s a police matter.”

Staff writer Louis Sahagun and correspondent Sylvia Pagan Westphal contributed to this story.