Service ∙ Hard Work ∙ Transparency ∙ Integrity

1

THE WEST WINGSanta Clara County District Attorney’s Office

V o l . 1 , F i r s t Q u a r t e r 2 0 1 3

70 West Hedding St., West Wing, San Jose, CA 95110

More than once in his short, meteoric career, Deputy District

Attorney Tyrone Wilson has looked across the courtroom and seen himself in handcuffs.

The lawyer sports stylish black-framed Tommy Bahama glasses and a suit that barely contains his muscles. It creates an effect that makes him look like a thinly-disguised superhero.

Through his designer glasses, Wilson observed a drug-addicted criminal defendant in a DOC jumpsuit and shackles. That, he thought, could have been me.

Unlike most prosecutors, Wilson has had a forced intimacy with things that many defendants have experienced. He has made many of their same mistakes. He has been hungry, abused, tossed from place to place. He knows the caustic, chemical stench of just-smoked crack, and the cordite stink of gunfire. He has stolen. He has stabbed. He didn’t learn about Crip gang signs from a webinar.

Tyrone’s path from the fatherless son of a Tulare crack addict to a successful Santa Clara County prosecutor travels through 20 foster homes; some which came with abuse, others with love;

McKinney’s door. Her little boys began to run out of the back door. The CPS workers said “Stop or you’ll get arrested.” The boys looked at the police officer behind her. They froze. That was the first time they took Tyrone away.

That was the day he learned to fear law enforcement, a fear mixed with a measure of respect. That is power, he remembers thinking. He was six.

The long line of foster homes brought with them new lessons in survival. He already knew how to steal bikes, armed with a butcher knife. He knew to wear baggy clothes to shoplift.

“Now I had to quickly figure out who was there to help me and who was there to hurt me. At the beginning I thought they were all there to help me.” But to some: “I was a check to them. They ate inside. We ate outside. They made us eat at a picnic table because they said we ate like animals.”

He remembers in one house staying up late to protect his brother Ernest from being molested. He remembers hiding in a closet so he was not molested.

(continued on page 2)

THE WEST WING

through cheering football stadiums; through the chambers of a judge who saw something of himself in a struggling, but perseverant survivor. Now Tyrone works on the law and motions team in the largest D.A.’s Office in Northern California.

His mother, Rosalee McKinney, died last year. Her addiction had practically destroyed her son’s life. Her death broke his heart. Recently, he looked at her photo on his desk. He said to her softly: “I wasn’t supposed to be here.”

Many years before, members of the Child Protective Services knocked on

Tyrone’s Story

Further investigation revealed that the suspect left his cell phone, a screwdriver, pliers and a radio deck under the scooter seat. Officer responded and fanned-out in search of the suspect. They eventually found gloves and a black nylon facemask. A jury found him guilty on all four counts, including being under the influence of meth.

D.D.A. Marisa McKeown prosecuted “The Have it Your Way” caper in a 3K multiple robbery

charge regarding two robbers who entered a Burger King in masks, gloves and armed with guns. Patrons at the drive-up waiting for their food order witnessed the robbery unfold, called 911 and followed the suspects as they fled. Police caught up to the vehicle, but the masked men got away. The driver, however, didn’t. He was there in the car, along with a mask that had been left behind on the passenger seat containing DNA. Cell phone records placed the suspects at the scene. Marisa got the conviction while nine months pregnant.

D.D.A. Debb Medved, Investigator Jeff Mock and Senior Paralegal Ivonne Zelaya helped a family get “Reunited and it feels so good.” They found a father who abducted a 15-month-old from the mother. While at court getting records necessary to put out an Amber Alert, Paralegal Zelaya mentioned to the deputies at the metal detector she was in a rush to get the information out as quickly as possible. The court clerk Peter Newton noticed the file was “out.” He attempted to locate the file and duplicate it. Once this was done, Zelaya came back to the office with the info. Meanwhile, the father had walked into the court clerk’s office. The quick-thinking clerk Newton recognized the name and notified Deputy Swenson who worked the metal detectors. The deputy called our office for D.D.A. Medved. The father was detained and interviewed by investigator Mock. The child was located nearby and safely returned to the mother. Two weeks prior to this incident, the Child Abduction Unit successfully reunited a mother with her three children whom she had not seen in four years.

2

He remembers a pastor who accused him of stealing his wallet and beat him with a belt so hard that there were marks on the seven-year-old boy’s face. The whole time

Tyrone was trying to tell him that the wallet was right there on the dresser. Some things happened that he can’t remember, or chooses not to.

“As a kid I thought about suicide. If I wasn’t a Christian, it would have happened.”

And there were families that took him in, disciplined him, loved him, slowly began to take the sharp edges off.

There was Rudy and Cathy Frasquillo – a Pop Warner football coach and his no-nonsense wife. They already had three kids of their own and four foster kids.

The first time he had met them was when Cathy threatened him when he threw rocks at her daughter. A few

years later he was, for all intents and purposes, their son.

When he got busted for marijuana, he was sure they would banish him from their lives.

They didn’t. She ferociously convinced a principal that Tyrone should not be expelled from school. When she walked out she looked at him and said, “Don’t prove me wrong.”

Now Tyrone wasn’t eating outside or just a state check.

“All of my foster kids know that they will be treated no differently than my own kids,’’ Rudy Frasquillo said. “You come into the family, then you are family...period.”

Under their discipline and tutelage his grades began to rise - and rise. He began to play sports, played the drums in band, take pleasure in simply succeeding. College went from something other kids did to a foregone conclusion.

Tyrone’s football prowess began to surge, using his natural strength and speed to excel on the hot Tulare gridirons.

D.D.A. Adam Flores prosecuted “The Call-Me-Maybe” suspect, William Lindley, who was on probation for a previous drug matter. While on patrol, a police officer noticed the suspect driving a motor scooter with no license plate and no helmet. Police tried to pull over the scooter, sparking a 3.2 mile low-speed chase. As he fled, the suspect began dumping small white baggies along the road. Finally, he crashed at the end of a dead-end road and flipped over the front end of the scooter. The suspect ran away. Police discovered that the scooter was stolen with the VIN filed down and unreadable.

(continued on page 4)

Soon he was an all-star Valley fullback and linebacker. He played two years at Fresno City and then went to SUNY-Buffalo, a Division 1 team.

It was in college that he was moved by a movie not known for being an inspiration for lawyers: “Pretty Woman.” To Tyrone, there was Richard Gere, rich, a successful arbitrage lawyer.

“It wasn’t just about the money he made. I had relatives that were rich selling drugs. I wanted people to look up to me. I wanted to achieve something in life.’

Tyrone applied to law school in Buffalo. He didn’t get in until he had a heart-to-heart with the dean. Tyrone told him that he wasn’t made up of mediocre grades and test scores. He was going to get into the law school - with or without him. He got in.

After law school, Tyrone took the bar exam. He failed. He took it again. He failed. He took it a third time. He failed.

THE WEST WING

3

Q: Have you always had an affinity for cars and vehicles? I mean have you always been able to sort of take ’em apart and put ’em back together?

A: Yea, it’s crazy. Kids these days. It seems like they don’t want to drive. Right? My wife works at a high school and there are 20 seniors in her class, none of them have their driver’s license. In Iowa, you could get your permit when you were 14, your license when you were 16.

Q: Realistically you were driving long before that, right?

A: Oh, yea, you were driving on the farm when you were old enough to reach the pedals.

Q: Tell me about your first race.

A: My first race I bought a Cutlass for $100 and raced an enduro (in Oskaloosa, Iowa.) It was a 300 lap enduro. I made it 14 laps. I crashed into a car in the front stretch. The way they ran enduros back then is they didn’t flag the race unless you were on fire or upside down. So I sat in the car on the front stretch broken for a hundred laps before somebody caught on fire.

Q: Was the crash your fault?

A: Oh yea, absolutely. All of my crashes have been my fault.

Q: Describe being in that car, in the middle of this clot of speeding cars and the dust. What’s it like?

A: Have you ever seen bees swarm? You’re in the middle of that swarm. Trying to get to the front. There’s people going everywhere and banging into everything. And you can’t see anything because the dust is kicking up so bad. It’s a trip. And you’re always at the edge of crashing and dying.

Q: You’ve gone a bit over that edge a few times?

A: I have this rock crawler that I like to go climb the mountains. I met this other guy through the rock crawling. I went with him on the dirt bikes to Mexico and I kept crashing. I broke my leg in 2005. It was a tibial plateau fracture. So we duct taped a stick to it. When we got to the road there was a Mexican lawyer there that was waiting for his buggy. So the Mexican lawyer gave us a ride, 150 miles to Valley de Trinidad where we were camping and then 200 hundred miles to San Diego. So, it was about 12 hours before I got to the hospital. I was swollen up pretty good, in pretty good pain. I really couldn’t walk right until I broke my back so I think it must have been psychological.

Q: Does it take a certain kind of person to race? Have you noticed a demographic or a personality type or psychology?

A: Yea, I mean most of ‘em are good ole boy rednecks.

Q: Well, you’re not.

A: I’m aspiring to be.

Q: Do you think there’s anything incongruous about being a prosecutor and being a car racer?

A: I don’t think so. I think you definitely need a different kind of person, right? I usually don’t tell everybody what I do for a living. Because the people you meet usually would be on the other side of the table, right? The people that find out what I do for a living are usually pretty surprised.

Q: What do they say? You’re a cop?

A: Well first of all, they don’t know what the hell a D.A. is. Then they all want me to write their will for ‘em.

Tom Flattery dons a suit as he works on the complex details of computer forensics cases for the high-tech unit. About once a month, he drives to the desert, dons a crash helmet and a flame retardant jumpsuit and puts his foot down - hard - on the pedal in a souped-up buggy and flies over the sand.

THE WEST WING

Q & A...with Deputy District Attorney Tom Flattery

4

WHAT’S GOING ON? WEST WING GALLERY

Justice Awards

DA Awards

Deputy District Attorney Frank Carrubba received the Prosecutor of the Year Award from the California Narcotic Officers Association (CNOA) Region One. On that same day, in a separate ceremony, Frank received the 2012 Gilroy Police Ad Honorem Award presented by the Gilroy Police Officers’ Association for his role in the investigations and prosecutions of two large scale criminal operations by violent gang members in South County, “Operation Garlic Press” and “Operation Royal Flush.”

Bin Chiang, Accountant II in Business Services, received the District Attorney’s Office Employee Excellence Award for the month of June 2013.

Royann Vallejos, Legal Secretary II, received the District Attorney’s Office Employee Excellence Award for the month of April 2013.

Michele Avila, Criminal Investigator III (Lt.), received the District Attorney’s Office Employee Excellence Award for the month of February 2013.

District Attorney OfficeMural Design Contest

Gogo v. Graffiti

... Tyrone’s Story

It was then that he took the advice of a judge he had a met at a conference. He asked for help.

Judge Valeriano Saucedo , the presiding judge of juvenile court in Tulare County, was the son of migrant workers. The judge was deeply moved by Tyrone’s story. He saw in him a lawyer, a leader, maybe even one day, a congressman.

“It’s one thing for someone who has not experienced tragedy to, in a theoretical way, say that “You, too, can be a success.’ It’s another one to step forward to say, “I was there. I lived through that. I succeeded.”

The judge and the young man worked together, honing Tyrone’s grasp of the King’s English. The next time he took the test, Tyrone passed. Saucedo swore him in to the California Bar at the Tulare Courthouse, with his beaming mother – now clean and sober for 11 plus years - and Mr. Frasquillo in attendance. (His other mother, Cathy Frasquillo, had since passed away.)

They have become fast friends, the judge a sounding board for the challenges in Tyrone life.

Judge Saucedo said that Tyrone’s harrowing life story makes him stronger, empathetic and a realist.

“He understands that your choices can put you in a great deal of trouble or help you accomplish great things.”

When Tyrone had finished telling his story to the hiring panel at the Santa Clara County District Attorneys Office, Chief Assistant Jay Boyarsky’s notes at the time were: Inspiring…a fighter…solid….resilient…persevering.

His “Dad” Rudy Friasquillo said: “Tyrone can do anything he wants. He could be a politician, although I told him that if he does then I will never trust him again.

Last year, Tyrone brought his D.A.’s offer letter to his biological mother in Tulare. “Look Mom,” Tyrone said, pointing to his impossible salary. She cried, “That’s my baby.” Tyrone knows he is a survivor, but he doesn’t try too hard to figure out how he survived. He faces his often

(Cont. from page 2)

painful past squarely. His brother Ernest was recently sentenced to nine years in prison and his brother Eugene to seven.

“Sometimes I feel like Paul the Apostle, sitting, wondering “why me.” But a verse like “Proverbs 3:5” reminds me that as long as God is in charge I don’t have to worry. I love the part of the verse that says “lean not on your own understanding.” I am flawed as a man and my decision-making is not always perfect. Sometimes I appeal to my heavenly Father for advice, which I know is perfect. I have to go on faith that what is happening is all a part of His plan. And so far it has all worked out, considering I am at one of the most prestigious D.A. offices in the country.”

“My story,” Tyrone said. “His glory.”

(CLICK each photo to read a story in electronic version or visit www.santaclara-da.org)

THE WEST WING