A man who brutally killed a gay, Vietnam War veteran in 2002 and then lived with the body for a month was given a sweetheart plea deal by then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris — outraging the community at the time.
Gary Lee Ober met his killer James McKinnon at a bar in San Francisco and took him to his apartment in Glen Park. After a scuffle, McKinnon stabbed Ober to death.
As Ober’s corpse rotted in a bathtub, McKinnon covered it with baking soda to help cover the odor. When Stephanie Henry, Ober’s neighbor, came to call on him, a well-dressed McKinnon came to the door and told her that Ober was on a $7,000 Walt Disney cruise vacation he’d won, SFGate reported at the time.
“I am still in therapy,” Henry told The Post this week, saying she remembered the day she looked out her own peep hole and noticed flies buzzing around her door. Eventually the fire department was called.
“[The firemen] broke the window and went in and he came out and [the firefighter] was white as snow,” she recalled.
“The maggots were in droves. Millions of maggots,” Henry recalled. “If it wasn’t for my mom being there to support me, I probably would have gone into the hospital for a week or so.”
In a jailhouse confession, McKinnon said he acted in self defense – a claim belied by the fact that Ober suffered from a back condition and had difficulty walking, according to the local Bay Area Reporter.
When Kamala Harris came into office in 2004 she promised to get tough on crime — but inherited a backlog of cases from her predecessor Terence Hallinan. One of those was the McKinnon case.
In 2005 — three years after the slaying — Harris agreed to a plea-bargain that allowed McKinnon to cop to voluntary manslaughter and get a six-year sentence with credit for time served. The deal also allowed McKinnon to skirt an elder abuse charge he was also facing.
McKinnon was a free man just two years later after securing parole in 2007.
Elliot Beckelman, an assistant DA who worked on the case told The Post that “gay panic” had been a factor in the decision to go easy on him.
“His defense was of a sexual provocation,” Beckelman recalled. “Unfortunately that was prevalent 20 or 25 years ago, back then it was not an uncommon defense … I don’t have any regrets on how this went down.”
Kamala Harris defended the plea deal at the time, saying, “I support my lawyers” and that “every case is different, with a different set of facts and circumstances.”
People close to Ober didn’t agree.
“I am just flabbergasted . . . this guy is a menace,” Ober’s friend Frank Franco told a local newspaper at the time. “I cannot believe this. It is beyond my comprehension. It wasn’t manslaughter. It was full outright, pointblank murder. I expected the son of a bitch to go to jail for the rest of his life. What was this prosecutor thinking? It’s unbelievable.”
Henry, who still lives in San Francisco, not far from the site of the killing, said she is still haunted by Harris’ decision and — while she’s not fan of Donald Trump — could not commit to backing the Democratic presidential candidate.
“When it comes to Kamala Harris, it did hurt me, It hurt me then and it hurts me now,” Henry said. “If I had not gone through this horrific situation in my life, I would vote for her.”
Charles Moran, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a coalition of LGBT Republicans, called the case a tragedy.
“LGBT voters would be interested to hear Harris try to defend herself, but that would require her doing interviews with reporters who aren’t cheerleading for her,” he said. “Kamala Harris has spent her entire campaign hiding from her actual record – this tragically unjust case is yet another reminder why.”
The Post was unable to reach McKinnon for comment. The Harris campaign declined to comment.
