Opinion ID: 2590211
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Murder of Roland Gerald Young

Text: About 8:19 p.m. on Saturday, June 10, 1978, the Orange County Sheriffs Department released Roland Young from its jail, where he had been confined since his arrest for public drunkenness earlier that day. Young, 23 years of age, stood five feet seven or eight inches tall and weighed 155 to 160 pounds. About 3:20 the following morning, a passing motorist saw what appeared to be a dead body on Irvine Center Drive in the City of Irvine but, as she was unsure what she had seen, she made no report until a later time. At 4:00 a.m., a Santa Ana firefighter saw Young's body at that location and called police. The responding officer observed the body was shirtless and saw a large amount of blood, still wet, in the crotch area of the pants. Blood on the pavement indicated the body had bounced as it hit the roadway after being ejected from a fast-moving vehicle. The left shoe was missing a lace, and there was no belt on the pants. A jail release form was in one of the pants pockets. The socks and shoes were labeled LACO, indicating they had been issued by the Los Angeles County jail. The cause of death was determined to be blood loss following four stab wounds to the chest, all of which entered the heart. At or near the time of death, a sharp knife had been used to cut the scrotal sac and remove one testicle and some skin from the penis. There were also antemortem lacerations over the left eyebrow and left eyelid. A faint mark was present on the back of the right hand and wrist. Young's blood-alcohol level at the time of death was 0.09 percent. There was diazepam in his blood and stomach in nontoxic concentrations. The combined effect of the alcohol and diazepam would have been extreme drowsiness or mild coma. The prosecutor argued to the jury that the entry JAIL OUT on defendant's list referred to Young. The defense presented evidence that Young was a user of any available type of drug and that, after his release from jail, he telephoned a friend, seeking a ride home from Santa Ana because he was in trouble with his supplier for using drugs for which he could not pay. Young's belt was not found among the belts taken from defendant's house. Nor did shoelaces taken from defendant's house match the lace in Young's right shoe. The defense also presented the testimony of Carmen Custer, who, while in custody on a petty theft charge in September 1982, had spoken to police concerning a June 1978 murder. He related that in June 1978 he had taken some prostitutes to a residence on South Birch Street in Santa Ana to buy heroin. The seller told the prostitutes he had stabbed someone the previous night and dumped him off Culver Road near the dump. Custer gave police the information in the hope of obtaining release from jail on his own recognizance. The manager of the South Birch Street apartment buildings identified by Custer testified that, in June 1978, a heroin dealer did live in the buildings, but not in the specific apartment identified by Custer. That apartment was occupied by an 87-year-old man who did not sell drugs. Custer had been arrested four times between June 1978 and September 1982, but did not give his information to police on those occasions. The dump off of Culver Road mentioned by Custer was quite a way from the location where Young's body was found. The defense also presented evidence that in April 1978 defendant had bailed his friend Wayne Wooden out of jail (implying this was the significance of the JAIL OUT entry). On rebuttal, however, Wooden testified defendant never referred to him as Jail Out; nicknames were not used for members of their poker and bridge group. In rebuttal, a criminalist testified he had compared a hair found on Young's pants to a hair sample from defendant's head. His examination showed that physical characteristics (color, thickness, curliness, and root and tip characteristics) and microscopic characteristics (pigmentation distribution) were consistent in the two samples. He could not, however, state definitively that the hair found on Young's pants came from defendant. One of defendant's sisters testified defendant's hair was bleached in the late 1970's.