On April 28, 2000, 20-year-outdated inmate Michael Dwayne Wallace was mopping the hallway of a operate furlough facility on Middlefield Highway when a single bullet crashed through the glass window and struck him in the upper body, killing him. Far more than 20 several years afterwards, police say they have found and arrested a suspect in the case.
In a assertion Thursday, Mountain Perspective law enforcement introduced they have arrested Stockton resident Charles Morris, 70, on murder prices immediately after compiling more than enough new evidence that he fired into the facility that evening and possible skipped his intended focus on, placing Wallace in its place.
Morris is getting held without bail in Santa Clara County Main Jail.
Wallace was serving a jail sentence for a small drug offense the calendar year prior, and was scheduled to be released in much less than a week when he was killed. In lieu of executing time in county jail, inmates convicted of non-violent costs had the choice to operate during the working day and snooze at a perform furlough facility that was found at 590 E. Middlefield Highway. The home has since been razed and replaced with tech offices.
Wallace was reportedly on clear-up obligation the evening of the slaying, and was chatting with another inmate when he was shot. He was taken to Stanford Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. Two staffers at the facility also endured injuries from the shattered glass.
The investigation at the time led law enforcement to Morris, another furlough employee who had butted heads with a person else working at the facility. Witnesses at the time stated Morris received into a heated argument that bordered on a physical confrontation, and that the man or woman he was upset with looked like one of the staffers standing in the hallway in close proximity to Wallace. But officers concluded that there wasn’t adequate evidence to arrest him.
“Though a thorough investigation was accomplished at the time, detectives were being not able to establish adequate evidence to move forward with the investigation,” law enforcement stated in the assertion Thursday.
Investigators sought to reexamine the situation starting off in 2019, and poured hundreds of several hours into re-interviewing witnesses and examining proof and criminal offense scene information. The added evidence was more than enough for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office to file murder rates, and Mountain See police arrested Morris at his property in Stockton. He was scheduled to be arraigned on the prices on Thursday, Aug. 19.
Wallace’s family members members concerned in the months next the murder that, though law enforcement took the circumstance significantly, the community and neighborhood media didn’t feel all that fascinated in what transpired. They explained Wallace experienced lately moved to the area and had no enemies, and that he possible was not the supposed target.
This is the next many years-old murder scenario solved by the Mountain Perspective Police Division this 12 months. In February, investigators used DNA evidence to decide the identity of a person who had stabbed and killed Milpitas resident Darryl O’Donnell in 1990. The suspect, Sunnyvale resident John Snowgrass, had died in 2006.