Trial is expected to begin this morning in Santa Ana for the third-striker parolee blamed for the first Orange County homicide of 2012.
Ean Keith Brown, 41, is accused of choking out a 21-year-old woman some time between Jan. 6-8, 2012, in his recreational vehicle that was parked in the driveway of his parents' Huntington Beach home.
Opening statements are scheduled to begin at 9:15 a.m. in the trial of Brown, who is charged with felony murder and sentencing enhancements for two prior strike convictions and serious felony priors for second degree robbery in 1995 and burglary in 2008. A conviction could send him to state prison for 85 years to life.
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Arias Dolores Fagan, 2012 OC Homicide No. 1: Parolee Ean Keith Brown Held for Her Murder
Brown pleaded guilty in 1995 to felony second-degree attempted robbery and in 1999 to felony unlawful taking of a vehicle. He was sentenced to 16 months in state prison. He was convicted in 2006 of felony possession of a controlled substance and was sentenced to three years probation and 270 days in jail. In 2009, he was convicted of felony first-degree burglary and was sentenced to two years in state prison.
He had recently been released from prison and was on parole and living in the RV on Jan. 6, 2012, the last time relatives of “Arias” Dolores Fagan saw the 21-year-old alive. She lived with the relatives on the same street as Brown, whose own parents contacted police just after noon Jan. 8, 2012, to suggest checking the RV. It was there cops found the body of Fagan, who had been strangled and stuffed in a sleeping bag.
Brown was not home at the time. About four hours later, California Highway Patrol officers and San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies spotted him driving north on I-15 toward the Nevada border. Brown was captured after a short, high-speed chase and turned over to the Huntington Beach Police Department.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.