An elderly female tourist was killed during the armed robbery of an upscale Newport Beach shopping mall in southern California. The trio of men who have been charged with her murder defied the Judge on Monday, June 8, by refusing to leave their jail cells and enter the court room.
18 year-old Malachi Darnell, 26 year-old Leroy McCrary (both of whom hail from Los Angeles), and 18 year-old Jaden Cunningham (from Lancaster, California) were on the docket to be arraigned at Santa Ana’s Orange County Superior Court, where they were obligated to enter their pleas of guilty or not guilty.
They are charged with the murder of 68 year-old Patricia McCay by means of running her down in a car and dragging her sixty-five feet after holding them up outside the bookstore at a mall in Fashion Island. All three are eligible to the death penalty if convicted of murder—the other charge, attempted second-degree robbery, carries its own less-severe penalties.
However, when the arraignment arrived, the defendants didn’t. This wasn’t the first time the trio thusly frustrated the machinery of justice: they employed the same tactic on July 5, dodging the scheduled hearing by refusing to be removed from their holding cells a mere two hundred yards from the court room.
The judge expressed puzzlement as to why the three were not present in the court room, saying that he had heard conflicting reports. Was their absence due to a psychiatric hold, or to a refusal to attend the proceedings?
The three men did show up—shirtless—on a video link at Monday’s arraignment hearing after deputies from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department put some iPads in the defendant’s jail cells. None of them spoke during their appearance, and as a result Judge Manssourian put another plea hearing and arraignment on the docket for Wednesday, July 9. The men have been ordered, once again, to show up for real this time.
