WEB OF LIES MAY HAVE SNARED YOUNG DRUG-USER-TURNED-INFORMANT

Killed Allegedly by People Who Knew of His Ties to Police

Chad MacDonald, a 17-year-old from Yorba Linda, spent the last months of
his life playing at the edges, balancing his involvement with illicit drugs
against his role as juvenile police snitch.

When he slipped off that edge, the fall was dramatic, resonating far beyond
his Orange County neighborhood to spark broad condemnations of the Brea
Police Department's use of juvenile informants and calls in Sacramento for
laws banning the practice.

Before MacDonald fell, before he was tortured and killed, before his
girlfriend was raped and shot and left for dead in the Angeles National
Forest, he appeared to be that most typical of suburban youths, a likable
jock who cherished his ride--a white 1991 Nissan pickup.

But he was also, in the last months of his life, living at the center of a
net of deceit--as a runner, a go-between, who used his prized truck as a
methamphetamine courier service between a Yorba Linda dealer and the
dealer's customers.

Police reports and interviews with many of the troubled young man's friends
and family and his family's attorney indicate that word was out on the
streets of Yorba Linda that if you wanted drugs, particularly meth,
MacDonald would be a good person to find. The local high school students
knew it. Drug dealers knew it. Even the police knew it.

Which is why, when a Brea traffic cop pulled MacDonald over early Tuesday
afternoon, Jan. 6, the officer was interested in more than traffic laws.

"I . . . told MacDonald that his name and vehicle were floating around
Yorba Linda as being involved with selling narcotics and asked him if it
was true," the unidentified officer wrote in his report after arresting
MacDonald on suspicion of possessing 10.99 grams of meth. (The Brea Police
Department is under contract to patrol Yorba Linda.) "MacDonald said that
he used to be involved in narcotics a long time ago, but he was now
straightened out."

It wasn't the last lie MacDonald told. He lied to his mother. He lied to
his friends. He lied to the police who agreed to drop the drug possession
charges if he turned snitch. He lied to his fellow drug dealers.

In the month since the youth's battered and strangled body was found in a
South Los Angeles alley, the MacDonald family lawyer and police reports
have cast him as a youth willing to cut deals to save his own skin while
continuing to use the meth that got him into trouble in the first place.

In the last week of his life, as word circulated on Yorba Linda streets
that he was cooperating with police, MacDonald stayed away from home, holed
up in a motel in Norwalk and made regular visits with his girlfriend to a
ramshackle drug house nearby.

Although the family's lawyer, Lloyd Charton, insists that MacDonald went to
the house to set up one last deal for the cops, police reports indicate
that Brea police had already dropped him as an informant and were moving
forward with criminal drug possession charges against him.

The reason: He wouldn't stop using meth.

The habit wouldn't die until he did.

In some ways, the mystery of Chad MacDonald lies not in his death, but in
his life, and why he stepped so willingly and fully into the world of
drugs.

Father's Death Shatters Promise of the Future

Chad Allan MacDonald Jr. was born April 7, 1980, to Chad Allan MacDonald
Sr. and Cindy Saroli MacDonald, a Detroit couple who staked their future on
a move to Southern California.

The promise of that future was shattered just after 2 a.m. March 5, 1981--a
month before the baby's first birthday--when Chad MacDonald Sr., drunk, ran
into a light pole less than a mile from home. He was killed and MacDonald's
mother was severely injured, left partially disabled and unable to work.

"[She is] not a well person," said her brother, Chris Saroli. "She's
paralyzed in her right arm. . . . You would never know it talking to her,
but when she's put under pressure, she cracks."

Thirteen months after her husband's death, Cindy MacDonald married Mark L.
Shyken. It was a troubled marriage from the start and ended in April 1986,
according to court records.

The couple had two sons together. But Shyken's problems with alcohol and
cocaine, which eventually landed him in rehabilitation, led Cindy MacDonald
to seek restraining orders against him, in part because he exposed their
children to drugs, she charged in court filings.

Shyken, who family members said has turned his life around, did not respond
to requests for an interview. His relatives declined further comment.

Chad MacDonald, Saroli said, was acutely aware that Shyken wasn't his
father. "I think it bothered him more than he let on," Saroli said. "He
knew in his heart that he didn't have a dad. That true bond was missing in
Chad's life. . . . [Shyken] cared for Chad, I believe that, but [Shyken]
went down another road."

Through it all, Cindy MacDonald and her boys remained close to her side of
the family, a rambunctious crew known for sloppy kisses and bearhugs,
Saroli said.

But there was darkness in the home too.

Police picked up MacDonald a month before his ninth birthday over an
unspecified vandalism incident, records show. Police also reported finding
him at an under-age drinking party in 1995, when he was 15.

Cindy MacDonald started noticing changes in her son last summer, around the
time her father suffered three heart attacks, family lawyer Charton said.
The grandfather survived, but his illness had a profound effect on
MacDonald.

"He went into a deep depression," Charton said. "Reflecting back, [Cindy]
thinks that's what caused the depression that led to the drugs."

Friends, though, said MacDonald was already involved with drugs. They said
that last fall he began using meth more often and lost about 20 pounds over
the winter.

'I Will Do Anything to Correct My Mistakes'

It didn't take MacDonald long to decide that the best way to get out of the
January drug bust was to do a little work for the police.

Police reports say MacDonald began cooperating as he was being booked,
acknowledging that he used and sold meth.

"I will do anything to correct my mistakes," the reports quote MacDonald as
saying, prompting an officer to ask if he would cooperate in identifying
the supplier.

The reports say that MacDonald agreed then to work with drug investigators
and that his mother signed a permission form when she picked him up. Saroli
contends that police took advantage of his sister.

"They forced her to do something she couldn't even really understand the
full consequences of," he said. "She trusted them, and they let her down."

Over the next week, MacDonald and Brea Police Det. James Griffin spoke
several times about setting up a drug purchase at a suspected drug house
near Esperanza High in Anaheim. On Jan. 15, after police wired MacDonald
with a fake pager, he bought meth from a woman at the house. Police raided
the house a few days later, but no drugs were found and no arrests were
made.

MacDonald continued to feed information to the police while cutting his own
deals on the side, using his arrangement to explain to his mother why he
was out late so often, police reports say.

Justin Wright, 18, a former classmate, said in an interview that he was a
passenger in MacDonald's truck around that time and watched him sell drugs
to a walk-up customer in a parking lot.

"We were just sitting there, and I looked over and he was counting all of
this money," Wright said. "I was, like, 'Whoa, dude, what's up with that?'
and he just said something about business being good."

MacDonald's juggling act began crumbling Feb. 19, the day he appeared in
court on charges relating to the Jan. 6 arrest, a tactic police were using
to pressure MacDonald. The hearing was delayed 30 days to give the teenager
more time to help set up one more bust.

About 7:30 that night, a Brea police officer noticed a white Nissan pickup
following a car too closely. He pulled the pickup over and found MacDonald
behind the wheel and in possession of 2 grams of methamphetamine and a
small amount of marijuana. MacDonald told the officer that he was trying to
find a phone to call Det. Griffin because he had just bought the drugs as
an informant.

"MacDonald seemed very nervous and jittery," the officer wrote.

The youth's handlers told the officer that they had no knowledge of the
buy, and to arrest him. There, on the side of the road, MacDonald was told
that he was done working as an informant because he had violated their
agreement, police reports say. He was released that night to his mother.

Youth Is Called a 'Snitch' at Party

The teenager was now in more trouble than he could know.

Within a few days of the second arrest, MacDonald left home for Norwalk,
making daily visits with a male friend to the drug house, according to
lawyer Charton. MacDonald mailed a note to his mother saying that "he was
trying to straighten his life around, he got a job and was going to
school," police records say.

Charton said the friend told him that MacDonald kept saying he needed to
"do one more buy." But the friends were also on a three-day party binge.

A familiar face showed up--the woman who earlier sold MacDonald meth at the
Orange County drug house, which had led to the unsuccessful police raid,
Charton said.

"[She] told all of those gang members that Chad was the little [expletive]
who narcked on her," Charton said. Two people pulled guns as MacDonald
furiously denied that he was working with police, Charton said, adding:
"They thought they were dead right there." But the confrontation eased
under MacDonald's emphatic denials.

MacDonald returned to the motel early Sunday, March 1, and slept through
the day. His girlfriend, 16, showed up at the motel that afternoon and
spent the night, Charton said, adding that the youth, accompanied by the
girl, went back to the house Monday to do more drugs.

While they were partying, Charton said, Florence Lela Noriega, 28, walked
up to the girlfriend and punched her in the face before turning to
MacDonald and calling him a "snitch." Two men--identified by police as
Michael Lucas Martinez, 21, and Jose Alfredo Ibarra, 19--jumped MacDonald
and began beating him, Charton said. (Noriega and Martinez have been
arrested, and Ibarra is a fugitive.)

That morning, the girlfriend's mother called police to report her missing.
About 24 hours later a motorist spotted the girl near the San Gabriel
Reservoir. She had been raped, shot and left for dead.

That afternoon Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies called Cindy MacDonald
to tell her about the girl. She hadn't seen her son for five days, and at
the suggestion of deputies filed a missing person's report, the police
reports say. It would be another day before investigators connected the
body found in South Los Angeles to her missing son.

Police asked Cindy MacDonald why she didn't file the report sooner. "Mrs.
MacDonald said," the report states, "because this has happened before."

Times researcher Sheila A. Kern and staff writer Tina Daunt contributed to
this story.

Copyright Los Angeles Times