By Laura Norton
The Press Democrat
July 5, 2009
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20090705/NEWS/907051001/1350?Title=Fort-Bragg-slaying-reveals-dark-secret
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| Liz McNeill of Fort Bragg is supporting Aaron Vargas, who shot and killed her husband, Darrell McNeill. Vargas claims that McNeill's husband sexually abused him for years. Photo by Kent Porter/Press Democrat |
Man accused in shooting says he was molested by victim as child; others come forward with similar charges
The winding mountain road that twists out of Fort Bragg and east into redwood forests was dark and deserted the night last February when Aaron Vargas drove to the home of a man he had known since boyhood.
This was not a social visit.
Vargas, 31, carried an antique black powder revolver, one that requires the loading of primer, wadding and a projectile before cocking the weapon, details that would become important months later.
On this night the gun was made ready to fire. Vargas approached, and now stands accused of pointing the gun and firing a single shot into Darrell McNeill's chest while McNeill's stunned wife, Liz, looked on.
As the 63-year-old man lay dying, according to court testimony, Vargas disassembled the gun, placed it on the kitchen counter, and told McNeill's wife why he was there: The man he shot was his molester.
McNeill, Vargas later told family, first molested him when he was 11 years old. He said he was just one of many boys who fell victim to McNeill, a man long seen in the community as a loyal husband, community volunteer and friendly salesman.
Darrell McNeill settled in Fort Bragg while working for the old Union Lumber Co. He led the local Mormon Church's Boy Scout troop in the 1980s and mentored youth in the Big Brother Big Sister program before that. He sold families their refrigerators and washing machines from the store he established. That he could lead a secret life molesting child after child was unimaginable, yet even his widow now believes the allegations to be true.
She now wonders if she ever really knew the man she was married to for 25 years, the man who fell on hard times when his business went bankrupt and he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
There were no clues, no signs to the abuse, she said.
The men who have come forward to Vargas' attorney to say they, too, were abused, are men Liz McNeill calls her "boys."
Like Vargas, they were kids that hung around the house to play, kids with whom her husband had a good rapport.
"What I learned that night, I didn't know had happened," said Liz McNeill, whose eyewitness account of the shooting likely will be pivotal in the jury trial set to start in September.
She has asked prosecutors to reduce the charges against Vargas.
The community is struggling with questions of justice -- for a homicide victim now branded a child molester, and for an accused killer who claims to be a sexual abuse victim. One is buried, the other in jail.
Prosecutors, however, say vengeance is no excuse for murder and the crime deserves 50 years to life in prison. A pretrial hearing will take place this month.
Supportive words
As the trial date nears, more than 1,000 comments asking the District Attorney's Office not to prosecute the case have been posted on a Web page set up by Vargas' family. Some of the comments are from victims of sexual abuse. Most are from current or former Fort Bragg residents. Many are coming to terms with a dark secret they may have lived with for decades.
Since the shooting, at least eight alleged victims have come forward to Vargas' attorney, Tom Hudson, revealing stories of widespread sexual abuse spanning more than a decade, some of them detailed in written statements.
McNeill "was always hustling ideas that he could use on these young men to continue a relationship and themselves in a position where he could make advances on them," Hudson said. "He was always there to help them out."
The attorney, based in nearby Albion, said the men have described decades of ongoing molestation at McNeill's home and on trips with the former youth leader. They said they were plied with alcohol and drugs, then forced to perform sex acts with McNeill.
None of the alleged victims have come forward to Mendocino County sheriff's authorities, detectives said.
"We've made an overt attempt to locate victims," Sgt. Greg Van Patten said. "No one's come forward. Nothing has been brought forward out in the open."
A single complaint, filed in 2001 with the Fort Bragg Police Department, names McNeill. But City Attorney Mike Gogna said the details were not subject to disclosure, adding, "nothing ever happened with that report."
Not discussed
One Fort Bragg man now in his mid-40s said that he was abused by McNeill, but molestation was something not to be talked about.
"In a small town you save face," said the man, who did not want to be identified. "You keep your mouth shut because it's embarrassing and you don't want anyone to know."
"Aaron may have made a bad choice, but he did what he thought was right," he said.
Despite the lack of legal record, Liz McNeill said she doesn't doubt any of the men's stories and has thrown her support behind the man who killed her husband.
"I have to believe it," she said. "Aaron's an honest kid."
For Mendocino County sheriff's officials and prosecutors, the case against Aaron Vargas is clear cut.
In a preliminary hearing on the case, Mendocino Sheriff's Sgt. Joseph Comer testified that Liz McNeill told him that on the night of Feb. 8 she heard a knock on the door of the couple's trailer. Her husband answered it and she heard Vargas telling her husband "he was never going to hurt anybody again."
Then Darrell McNeill was shot. Once. Fatally.
Not-guilty plea
Vargas, a part-time handyman who was planning a wedding, taking care of his newborn baby and in the midst of buying a house when McNeill was killed, has pleaded not guilty.
Vargas' parents later said in an interview that their son came to their house shortly after McNeill was killed and told them for the first time that he had been sexually molested.
"He left Darrell's house and drove to my parents' house and told my mom the cops are coming for him and he was sorry," Mindy Galliani, Vargas' sister, said.
Vargas was arrested as he walked away from his parents' house that night.
From a police perspective, the facts of the case add up to first-degree murder.
"Aaron Vargas went over there with the intention to kill," Van Patten said.
The revolver used to kill McNeill required the shooter to be deliberate: loading the primer, wadding and projectile, cocking the gun and firing.
"For him to do that, he had some knowledge of what he was about to do," Detective Jason Caudillo said. "It's a cut-and-dried homicide."
Vargas' claim that McNeill sexually abused him has little bearing on the facts of the case, Van Patten said.
"It really doesn't change the circumstances of the case, other than to shed light on the motive," he said.
The motive, Vargas' attorney says, was the bottled-up rage from years of abuse.
Fort Bragg in the 1980s was a town of just over 5,000 people. It was a quiet, idyllic place to raise a family, said Jere Mello, a Fort Bragg resident since 1966 and a current City Council member.
"Fort Bragg was very family oriented and very conservative," Mello said. "Union Lumber was the employer. If you were a graduate, the mill had a job for you. It was a pretty close-knit town."
McNeill employed young men to work in his American Homes Store and befriended his sons' friends, whom he regularly took on out-of-town fishing trips and vacations.
In 1987, 10-year-old Vargas was a happy-go-lucky kid who played Little League and took piano lessons. He was a country boy who could kill a deer and hook a fish. In family pictures, Vargas is frequently seen with his finger linked through the gills of that day's catch.
He grinned wide and crooked. He told jokes and made neighbor Liz McNeill laugh. He was a friend of Darrell McNeill's son, Michael, and a frequent visitor at the McNeills' home next door to his own.
That changed after a fishing trip with McNeill, when Vargas was 11, his mother, Robin Vargas, said.
That's what she says her son told her from his jail cell in Ukiah. Robin Vargas said the family still doesn't know when the sexual abuse ended, or the extent of it.
Psychological abuse
Hudson said it was as much psychological as sexual.
"There was a continuation of harassing Aaron and molesting Aaron," Hudson said. "The older Aaron got, the more sporadic the sexual action became. But on the other hand, the more energetic McNeill was in trying to further contact him."
Selena Barnett, the defendant's fiancee and mother of his 9-month-old daughter, said psychological abuse was ongoing.
For months before the shooting, McNeill harassed her family, she said, dropping by the house at all hours, calling constantly and making repetitive demands to baby-sit Vargas' newborn.
That portrait will likely be part of the trial. It's a far different view of the man his friends remembered.
McNeill "was always a sort of jovial fellow, a nice guy," Mello said.
"I don't know anything about any abuse," he said. "On the other hand, this Vargas fellow took the pistol and drove out Sherwood Road. That's a long ways."
As the case now stands, Vargas faces charges of first-degree murder, false imprisonment of Liz McNeill and preventing her from calling the police. All three counts are felonies and carry special allegations that he committed the crimes using a firearm, which would add time to his sentence.
Assistant District Attorney Beth Norman, who will argue the case with District Attorney Jill Ravitch in September, said she expects the case to evolve as prosecution and defense teams exchange information relating to the death and Vargas' mental state at the time of the shooting.
Hudson said self-defense and battered-woman's syndrome, a psychological stress disorder that has been applied legally to murder cases and resulted in lesser charges against a defendant, could be effective arguments in Vargas' defense.
Lesser charges sought
Anything that reduces the sentence that Vargas is facing would end up pleasing both the Vargas family and the murder victim's widow.
"I'm angry at the situation," Liz McNeill said. "At the man I didn't know, at the man I did know."
Robin Vargas says in death, McNeill simply got off too easy:
"At first I was so frustrated that I couldn't yell at him or beat him. I wanted him resurrected."
And for Selena Barnett, who regularly visits her fiance at the Mendocino County Jail, it should have been McNeill on trial.
"That would have been pretty damn satisfying," she said.
Fort Bragg residents without ties to either family agree justice will be difficult to find.
"On the one hand, you feel badly for what (Vargas) went through," said Josh Richardson, bishop of Fort Bragg's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which no longer counts McNeill as a member. "On the other hand, we are a nation of laws."
Dan Gillman, assistant pastor at Calvary Chapel with offices next door to McNeill's former storefront, said Vargas "still needs to stand, be accountable for what he's done wrong.
"Our past doesn't absolve us of doing something wrong or right," Gillman said.
Liz McNeill, who describes herself as still "numb" and "doubly shocked" by her husband's murder, is grasping for something to hang onto.
"I can understand why he did what he did," she said. "I don't condone the killing, but I can understand it."
You can reach Staff Writer Laura Norton at 521-5220 or laura.norton@pressdemocrat.com
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