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Stop Him Before He Kills Again!

In January, 1999, the Lake County District Attorney recently charged Jerrold Johnson with the brutal murder of two women there last month. The body of Marge Johnson, Jerrold's step-grandmother, was found in her Glenhaven home after a suspicious fire on December 5, 1998. Just fourteen days later, Ellen Salling's body was found. Salling had been beaten to death. Jerrold Johnson was arrested on December 21st driving Salling's car.

These two women need not have died!
Back in October, 1992, Jerrold Johnson also murdered Jennifer Von Seggern here in Santa Rosa. In that case, Sonoma County District Attorney Mike Mullins Visualize Justicepersonally supervised a plea bargain arrangement that convicted Johnson of manslaughter, not murder. The end result was that Johson spent only six months in prison for the murder of Von Seggern, the 32 year-old mother of two.

But these are not the first women to die at the hands of District Attorney Mike Mullins.

  • Marķa Teresa Macias was hunted down and murdered by her husband Avelino on April 15, 1996, after more than 22 pleas to law enforcement for help. At least three times prior to her murder, D.A. Mike Mullins failed to file charges on Avelino's child abuse, stalking, and violations of restraining orders.

  • In November, 1996, the adolescent children of Mina Arevalo woke to discover their parents' dead bodies in the adjoining bedroom. Mina had been shot nine times by her husband Nick, who then committed suicide. Although the police report sent to D.A. Mullins on a previous domestic violence incident had indicated the presence of an eye-witness, Mullins had dumped the case citing "lack of corroboration." Only after Mina's death was the corroborating witness statement written up and included in the record.

  • On October 22, 1997, the badly decomposed body of 12 year-old Georgia Moses was found discarded off a Petaluma freeway on-ramp. Among the many Sonoma County agencies that had failed to act in the face of repeated indications that Georgia's family was in severe distress was the office of District Attorney Mike Mullins. Both in late April and early August, 1997, just weeks before Georgia's murder, Mullins had refused to file charges on new sex offenses against Eddie Pope, a convicted child molester who had moved in on Georgia's disabled mom. Friends say Georgia hated and feared Eddie, who is suspected my many to be the murderer and by others to be the reason Georgia was driven in the streets.

  • On November 18, 1997, Gina Barnett's bullet-riddled body was discovered in Folsom, California. Gina was murdered by James Nivette, her boyfriend and father of her 18 month-old son. After Barnett's death, Mike Mullins admitted he had mishandled a January, 1997 Sonoma County case against Nivette for his abuse of Barnett. Mullins' office granted a conditional dismissal of the case, despite the fact that Nivette was already on domestic violence probation when the new spousal abuse case occurred. In the fall of 1995, Mullins had promised the county's Task Force on Violence Against Women that there would be no more conditional dismissals in domestic violence cases.

According to the press, here's the evidence Mike Mullins had in the Jennifer Von Seggern murder case:

  1. Jennifer disappeared shortly after telling family and friends that she was breaking up with Johnson.
  2. Johnson told at least six different and conflicting stories to explain Jennifer's disappearance. Two people said he had implicated himself in her death.
  3. When Jennifer's father went to check on his daughter after not hearing from her for three days, the door was answered by a complete stranger who knew nothing about Jennifer's whereabouts and said that Jerrold Johnson had asked them to live there.
  4. Just days after Jennifer's disappearance, Jerrold Johnson sold her car after forging her signature on the papers. The car had bloodstains on the backseat and floorboard and an odor so strong, "I had to open both windows to drive it," said the man who cleaned it.
  5. Jennifer's body was found three months later dumped in a ravine. There was a plastic bag tied around her head and she was hog-tied with a sewing machine cord. A sewing machine was found in the apartment Jennifer shared with Johnson; the cord was missing. Her body had been dumped in a sleeping bag and wrapped in wire. The wire matched Christmas lights found in their apartment.

This is just the evidence the D.A. acknowledged to the press -- who knows how much more the case file contains? Yet even in the face of this damning evidence, Deputy D.A. Bud "Dump-the-Case-and-Run" McMahon and Mike Mullins said they couldn't prove murder. Sentenced to six years for manslaughter, with credit for time served and an inexplicably missing year, Johnson left prison free to kill again after just 6 months!

We demand that District Attorney Mike Mullins prosecute domestic violence before the women are dead! Please send this flyer to the California Attorney General along with your plea that he help us straighten out this deadly District Attorney!

Bill Lockyer, California Attorney General
PO Box 944255
Sacramento, CA 94244-2550

 

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© Tanya Brannan, Purple Berets
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