A man was sentenced Friday to 55 years to life in prison for strangling a longtime friend in his Huntington Beach motor home after a night of partying three years ago.
Ean Keith Brown, 41, was convicted Feb. 4 of second-degree murder in the killing of 21-year-old Dolores “Arias” Fagan.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Gregg Prickett handed down the maximum punishment for Brown, who has prior convictions for residential burglary and robbery.
That came as a relief to the victim’s mother.
“I don’t want someone else’s daughter to get what my daughter got,” Sally Fagan told City News Service.
Fagan said she has been dogged with anger since her daughter’s death. As Brown was being sentenced, she said she couldn’t help but think “how he took my baby’s last breath and he can still sit there and breathe.”
Fagan described daughter as a “young, free-spirited child. She was my little girl.”
“If she didn’t call, she was in trouble,” Fagan said. “That’s how I knew something was wrong when she didn’t call me that day.”
The victim was attending adult school to get her high school diploma, and hoped to go on to culinary arts school to realize her dream of becoming a chef, her mother said.
Deputy District Attorney Howard Gundy said Brown was living in a motor home parked in the driveway at the home of his mother and stepfather at 8391 Danbury Circle in Huntington Beach when he went out partying with transients and Fagan in Hidden Valley Park the night she was killed.
The two would frequently get together to do drugs when the San Luis Obispo resident was in town visiting her grandmother, Gundy said.
Fagan got falling-down drunk at the Jan. 6, 2012, party and needed help stumbling back to the defendant’s motor home, he said.
Investigators relied on physical evidence and Brown’s statements to police to piece together a scenario of what happened next. The victim, who likely died sometime after midnight Jan. 7 or Jan. 8, was strangled and beaten, Gundy said. Brown wrapped her body in a sleeping bag, he said.
Brown left the RV on Jan. 8, and told his stepsister what happened before he started driving to Las Vegas, prompting the sibling to contact their mother, who called police, Gundy said.
Brown refused to pull over when he was spotted on the Mojave (15) Freeway by San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers, touching off an hour-long pursuit in which he tossed his cell phone out the window before being arrested.
The defendant’s DNA was found under the victim’s fingernails, on her breasts and in her crotch area, Gundy said. To buttress the prosecution’s theory that he sexually assaulted the victim, a 27-year-old transient testified that Brown forced himself on her in the motor home weeks before Fagan’s death, Gundy said.
David Dworakowski of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office argued that while there was no dispute that his client killed Fagan, it was a case of involuntary manslaughter at the hands of a drug-addicted man with the mind of a third-grader.
He said his client had no motive to kill the victim and told jurors the two had a “bond of love. In this case the bond was drugs.” The two would indulge in “the worst drugs known to mankind,” such as methamphetamine, bath salts and vapor from paint “huffed” out of a bag, the defense attorney said.
Methamphetamine “played a huge role in this case,” said Dworakowski, who told jurors that the drug can make a user delusional.
—City News Service