Attorneys clash during final arguments of McStay family murder trial
Clashes between attorneys Wednesday, May 29, punctuated final arguments in the trial of Charles Ray Merritt, who is accused of killing the four-member McStay family in 2010.
“This is the case of the People versus Charles Merritt,” San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney Melissa Rodriguez told the panel during an approximately 14-minute late-afternoon rebuttal that she will resume Thursday.
“I think, after listening to the arguments by both defense counsel, that’s been forgotten a little bit,” Rodriguez said. “This is not the People versus Dan Kavanaugh” — the business associate of slain family patriarch Joseph McStay whom the defense team has pointed to as the overlooked suspect in the case.
Kavanaugh has denied involvement, and prosecutors have said he is not a suspect the case.
“This not a case against Sean Daugherty, Britt Imes, or Melissa Rodriguez, despite the fact that we have been attacked constantly throughout it,” Rodriguez told the panel, naming the prosecutors.
The final arguments, which started Tuesday, have frequently stepped outside the boundaries of a contest over evidence.
“Why are they playing games like this? Why are they trying to convince you with facts they haven’t proven? … They’re trying to pull one over on you,” defense attorney James McGee said at one point Wednesday.
On Tuesday, he told the jury that Imes was lying to them.
#McStay – McGee accuses Imes of lying to the jury during his closing argument. “Do you like being lied to?” He talks about Imes turning his back to the jury while he’s talking, “It’s easier to lie when my back’s to you.” pic.twitter.com/82C282e605
— Cathy Russon (@cathyrusson) May 28, 2019
McGee also called the prosecution case “a fraud.”
Rodriguez told the panel, “You’ve heard some pretty big tales that have come from the defense … all of the information that they just gave to you, those aren’t the facts of the case.”
When jurors returned from noon recess, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Smith admonished them that a morning statement from McGee that the prosecution should have called Kavanaugh as a witness had to be disregarded.
The ruling came after heated exchanges out of the jury’s presence.
Merritt, 62, has pleaded not guilty to the charges that he killed McStay, 40, a business associate, his wife, Summer, 43, and their two children, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3, in their Fallbrook home more than nine years ago.
He was arrested and charged in November 2014 – a year after the McStay family’s skeletal remains were discovered in two shallow graves west of the 15 Freeway and north of Stoddard Wells Road, near Victorville. Merritt is a former Apple Valley resident.
Merritt and McStay worked together to sell large-scale water features; McStay found customers and Merritt assembled the works. Prosecutors said Merritt was being cut out of the business and owed McStay money. The defense said the men were best friends and Merritt had a lucrative future working with McStay.
During Wednesday’s arguments, defense attorneys McGee and Rajan Maline told jurors that investigators ignored evidence on financial records that would have exonerated Merritt; that the defense believes the McStay family was kidnapped from their home by perhaps three people on Feb. 5; and that Merritt was at home in Rancho Cucamonga, and not in Fallbrook on Feb. 4, the night prosecutors said the family was slain.
The prosecution rebuttal will continue Thursday.