Gay Man Pleads Guilty In San Diego To Murder And Burying Victim Inside Concrete Egg
To avoid a possible death sentence, a gay man who strangled another man and entombed his body inside a concrete egg decided to plead guilty on March 18 to first-degree murder. It’s no plea bargain for parolee Thomas Jeffrey Brooks, 41, who faces a state prison term of 75 years to life. Brooks admitted killing Edward Andrews, 80, in 2008, and also pleaded guilty to 13 burglary counts involving theft of Andrews’ credit cards, which Brooks and an accomplice used at stores and for cash advances.
Sentencing was set for June 22 by San Diego Superior Court Judge David Gill. Brooks remains in the San Diego central jail on $3 million bail.
Brooks’ attorney, Gary Gibson, told reporters after the plea that Brooks was motivated to plead guilty because he might face the death penalty if convicted at trial. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis had not yet made the decision to seek the death penalty, but Brooks had been charged with the special circumstance of murder for financial gain.
Deputy District Attorney Dino Paraskevopoulos said Brooks will have to serve a minimum 75-year term before he could be eligible for parole. He said Brooks put a personal ad in a gay magazine based in Palm Springs while Brooks was in a Florida prison.
Brooks described himself as French and 25 years old, and Andrews began writing to Brooks as a pen pal, said the prosecutor. When Brooks was paroled in 2007, he went to live with the elderly gay man in his mobile home in Hemet. Andrews disappeared around June 1, 2008.
“Elders, when they get lonely, they may let their guard down. This defendant was a mastermind criminal,” said Paraskevopoulos, who added that Brooks had a long criminal record that included arson, child abuse, possession of child pornography and many thefts.
Brooks wrote a neighbor to Andrews while claiming to be Andrews and said they were on a European vacation. It drew suspicion from the neighbor because the neighbor’s first name was misspelled throughout the letter. Brooks put Andrews’ body in a cement casing that he kept adding newspapers and other materials to it.
The bizarre structure was left as part of a rock garden in the back yard of a house in the 3400 block of Alabama Street in North Park. Andrews was found with a belt around his neck and duct tape was placed across his mouth. His legs were lifted up to his chest and the body was surrounded by chicken coop wire, and then covered with a purple blanket, plastic tarp, and concrete.
Brooks was a friend to Ben Mason, who rented his own condo to Brooks, whom he knew under an alias. Mason lived at the Alabama Street house with two other roommates. One roommate broke open a part of the cement orb and Mason testified he saw a “shriveled foot” accompanied by a foul odor on Sept. 5, 2008.
Mason testified the concrete egg was ugly, weighed about 300 pounds, and it looked like a paper mache rock. Mason said Brooks told him he wanted the orb to be “the centerpiece of the formation” of the rock garden, and that Brooks said he felt “peaceful and serene in the back yard.”
The roommates called San Diego Police upon seeing the foot, and they stayed up all night answering questions separately from officers as to why a body in such a structure was in their back yard. They were not charged with any wrongdoing.
On Feb. 11, Arlo Elizarraraz, 20, of Chula Vista, was sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading guilty to being an accessory to murder after the fact and 55 counts of fraud involving the victim’s bank account and credit cards.
Elizarraraz purchased the cement, chicken wire and a shovel at Home Depot, but said he did not know it was to be used to entomb a body. Brooks told police that Elizarraraz was not involved in the murder. In sentencing Elizarraraz, Judge David Danielsen said his actions involved “disrespect (of) the remains” and “to participate in any way with what happened to the victim … is truly as black and criminal as much as doing the deed itself.”
Montgomery County Maryland Police have charged two teens Monday in the murder of gay District of Columbia. middle school principal Brian Betts.
Betts, 42, a principal at Shaw Middle School the District of Columbia and a lead figure in education reform efforts in the District, was found dead in his Silver Spring home April 15 by colleagues worried after he failed to show up for work.
According to the Washington Post, Sharif Tau Lancaster and Alante Saunders, both 18, were charged with murder, robbery and a handgun violation. Police said that a third 18-year-old man was being held and that they expected that he would also be charged in the killing.
Investigators say they think the trio used a phone hook-up line line to find a target to rob and Montgomery Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said today that there was no indication that Betts alleged killers had any relationship with Betts before he arranged a meeting with one or more of them on the phone line.
District of Columbia officials also say that Lancaster and Saunders had recently escaped from the custody of a D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services home, but it was not clear whether they were considered escapees at the time of Betts’s killing.
According to Chief Manger, investigators tracked the trio down after Lancaster, Saunders and Lancaster’s mother used credit cards stolen from Betts at several DC area businesses and from fingerprints police found in Betts home and in his stolen SUV.
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Clattenburg, 24, was shot Feb. 21 inside his mother's apartment in the 1400 block of West Bitters Road.
Cody Carmichael (pictured below last) was charged with murder Monday after he confessed to detectives that he shot Clattenburg because the victim made sexual advances toward him, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. Carmichael, 21, remained in Bexar County Jail on Tuesday under $100,000 bail.
The affidavit states police traced the victim's last phone calls to a man who told detectives he gave Carmichael the handgun used to kill Clattenburg.
Carmichael allegedly told police the sexual advances occurred when the man who supplied the handgun was with them at Clattenburg's apartment. After taking the man home, Carmichael returned to the North Side apartment and killed Clattenburg, the affidavit states.
No charges have been filed against the man who provided the handgun.
Clattenburg's sister Ginger, who asked to be identified by first name only, said her brother had been in Carmichael's presence once or twice before.
She said her brother was warming a plate of meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, and green beans when he answered the apartment door.
“It was like someone came to the door unexpectedly,” she said. “His food was still in the microwave. This was truly life interrupted.”
Ruth Clattenburg, the victim's mother, said: “When Troy answered that door, he never dreamed this man would have done that.”
She said the men her son was with that night “must have known” about his sexual orientation.
“He didn't deserve this,” she said, wondering if Carmichael was aware she was asleep in the apartment when her son was killed.
She said she heard what sounded like a gunshot around 2 a.m. Feb. 21, but she didn't think anything of it until she woke up to take her dachshund, Bailey, for a walk around 7:15 a.m.
She said she saw her son's body propped up against a dryer in the hallway between his bedroom and bathroom. A single .380-caliber shell casing was found near the front door, beneath a poster of the Ten Commandments. There were no signs of forced entry, police said.
“I said, ‘Troy, what are you doing on the floor?' and then I felt that he was cold,” she said. “I went into shock, and my heart is broken into a million pieces.”
A spiritual man, Troy Martinez Clattenburg was small-framed and gentle, his sister said.
“We're not buying that he was sexually aggressive,” she said. “Anyone who would do this to Troy would do this to a small child. I definitely think this was a hate crime.”
The victim's father, Martinez, would not discuss his son's death Tuesday.
Glen H. Footman would appear to be the perfect candidate to get a check from Maryland's Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.
He was shot in September 2008 while walking hand-in-hand with his longtime partner, Alex Chavarria, on Howard Street in Mount Vernon. Witnesses told police that a young man, previously overheard saying, "I'm going to kill myself a gay tonight," stopped to ask Footman a question or bum a cigarette, and then shot him twice.
Baltimore police classified the shooting as a possible hate crime but have not made any arrests. Footman spent months at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, then at a rehabilitation center, then at home. In July, he returned to Shock Trauma for more surgery, and he died Nov. 9.
Glen H. Footman, a true victim if there ever was one in Baltimore, died too soon to get any money from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.
A spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which oversees the panel, told me an investigator had put the application on the docket in early November, but the board wasn't due to vote until a week after Footman died.
And because Footman, 52, had no spouse and no dependents, there is no one for the state to give the money to.
Footman and Chavarria, together for 13 years, could not marry in Maryland. And had they been legally wed in one of the few states that recognizes gay marriage, it is unclear whether Chavarria could receive compensation here. Maryland's attorney general is working on an opinion as to whether this state would recognize unions that are legal elsewhere.
But even that indignity isn't what has Chavarria, who has moved back to his home state of Texas, so upset.
He is angrier with what he calls bureaucratic fumbling by the board, which he says repeatedly delayed dealing with the case because of lost faxes, missed information and poor record-keeping. He said one clerk told him she had misplaced his file and that it had to be redone and resubmitted.
"I am upset and disappointed that this program never helped us and is not organized to work, even for those who do it right from the start," Chavarria said in an e-mail. "Why does the board not recognize that the victims include the family and/or caregivers who are truly the ones supporting everything financially?"
