Murder Conviction for Drunk Driver Upheld
A state appellate court has upheld the murder conviction and 30-year-to-life sentence given a drunk driver who killed four people in a head-on crash on the Ventura Freeway.
Daniel Edmund Murray, 29, of Lancaster, was convicted by a jury in 1988 of four counts of second-degree murder and two counts of felony drunk driving for the Dec. 11, 1986, wrong-way crash that killed Suzanne Brown, 37; her son, Jonah, 7; her father, Jack Rawls, 69, and Dia Rae Rounds, 16, of Ventura.
After reportedly drinking about 19 beers the day of the crash, Murray drove his pickup truck eastbound on the westbound Ventura Freeway for at least three miles before hitting Brown’s car in Agoura. Brown’s son, Jamaal, riding on a bus with his high school basketball team, saw his mother’s wrecked Honda Accord surrounded by ambulances.
Murray’s appeal said that the burden of proof for second-degree murder had not been met.
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