Questions arise over a jailed father,
a dead son and Kern County

(Published March 8, 1999)

By Donald Munro, The Fresno Bee

BAKERSFIELD - A name is a gift. Patrick Dunn, a father, gave his to Danny, his son. The Dunn family name is like any other: a legacy, a link between generations, a reminder that some things outlive us.

It outlived Danny Dunn.

In ever-vigilant Kern County, amid the dusty oil wells and cheery, tree-lined suburban sprawl, where prosecutors boast of the highest incarceration rates in the state, the Dunn name is seen by some as a thorn threatening to prick the thick skin of the criminal-justice system.

Patrick Dunn was sentenced in 1993 to life in prison for killing his second wife, Sandy.

After a trial that saturated the airwaves and splashed across countless pages of newsprint, Patrick Dunn, now 62, was sent to Corcoran State Prison, where he remains today.

Patrick Dunn’s name bounced back into the news recently because of a book titled “Mean Justice: A Town’s Terror, A Prosecutor’s Power, A Betrayal of Innocence."

The author, Edward Humes, maintains he uncovered serious prosecutorial flaws in Dunn’s case, including concealed evidence, behind-the-scenes lobbying by politicians and crucial information not heard by the jury about the star witness in the case.

John Somers, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, calls the book “melodramatic excesses."

Such a book could be expected to open old wounds, even in crime-fighting Bakersfield.

Even without Danny Dunn.

On Feb. 17, the troubled 37-year-old man had a bicycle accident. The next day, he checked himself into a hospital, where he suffered a brain seizure. Halfway through an MRI exam, he took a swing at a hospital worker and fled the hospital.

That evening, Danny Dunn fell down two staircases at his modest apartment across from Bakersfield High School, home of the Drillers. Neighbors called the police. Danny Dunn was taken to the Kern County Jail and charged with public intoxication.

He screamed for five hours in an isolation holding cell, police say. Officers gave him a burst of pepper spray and shackled his hands and feet. He died immediately, according to police reports.

The date and time: 2 a.m. Feb. 19.

By just two hours, it was the same day that “Mean Justice," the book about his father, was officially released.

Beyond awful coincidence, no one is suggesting a link between the two Dunns and their encounters with the Kern County justice system. Danny Dunn was seriously ill, both physically and mentally.

“But the timing on all of this is out of the world,” says Jennifer Dunn, Danny’s sister.

An autopsy report is scheduled to be released this week, authorities say.

Members of the family, who steadfastly have proclaimed Patrick Dunn’s innocence, have questions regarding Danny Dunn’s death. While careful not to accuse officers of misconduct, they’re suspicious. By conducting an internal investigation into the matter, the Sheriff’s Department is, in effect, investigating itself, they say.

Beyond that, all they can do is mourn the lives of two Dunns: one dead, the other in prison.

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything,” Jennifer Dunn says. “But for my dad to know that Danny died in a Kern County jail must be devastating for him.”

* * *

It wasn’t easy being a Dunn in the months surrounding Patrick Dunn’s murder trial.

Patrick Dunn married Nancy Leonetti in 1960. Together they had three children. He was a history teacher and principal. She is a junior high-school counselor.

Between them, they educated thousands of Bakersfield children. “Everyone in town knows where we live,” Nancy Dunn says with a smile.

They divorced in 1985. Patrick Dunn married Sandy Paola in 1986, but he remained on friendly terms with his ex-wife.

During the trial and its aftermath, Patrick Dunn’s children hunkered down in the glare of unwelcome publicity. “Let’s put it this way: My brother Patrick Jr., the eldest moved out of Bakersfield, then moved out of state,” Jennifer Dunn says.

Danny Dunn’s problems started long before. His mother says he had had trouble fitting in since he was a child. He was overactive, creative and very intelligent, but never able to focus.

In trouble with drugs and the law, Danny had a tempestuous relationship with his father, who was an alcoholic. After a fistfight, Patrick ordered his son, then in his early 20s, out of the house, and they never spoke again. Danny spent time in jail in the early ’90s for petty theft, according to court records. In the last years of his life he was drug-free, his sister says.

Although he’d left Bakersfield after his father’s conviction, Danny returned about a year ago. He and his family both knew he had come home to die.

“He needed to be next to Mom,” Jennifer Dunn says.

He was suffering from AIDS and had occasional seizures, his mother says. The disease hadn’t yet progressed to a physically debilitating state. Psychologically, though, it battered him.

He couldn’t hold a job but held on to his independence by living alone and pedaling around town on a bicycle. He relied on Social Security disability income to make ends meet.

“I did manage to see him a lot, especially in the last couple of months,” Nancy Dunn says. “He was around for Christmas.”

In his newspaper obituary, she wrote: “Danny was like a ship coming home, hovering near the shore, dangerously close to rocks battered by torrential waters. He tried to connect safely to shore, yet a mist of darkness clouded his vision.”

* * *

Piecing together the last two days of Danny’s life, it’s clear that the mist became a fog. Doctors found something suspicious on his MRI at Mercy Hospital, but he balked at being injected with dye and fled before the second half of the test could be completed, his sister says.

He returned home to his apartment, a 1930s-era building with a chain-link fence surrounding a beaten lawn.

Neighbors say he became drunk and belligerent. He locked himself out of his apartment wearing nothing but his underwear, then fell down both the front and rear flights of stairs to his apartment.

One neighbor, who asked not to be identified, stood in the musty interior stairwell, harshly lit and worn from decades of hard use, and pointed to Dunn’s blood still smeared on the tired, tan walls.

Michael Beebe, another neighbor, is legally blind but heard the confrontation with police.

“They told him to come down,” Beebe says. “He said, ’I don’t have to! I’m on private property!’ “

By the time Bakersfield police officers arrested Danny Dunn at 8:20 p.m., he had calmed down, Beebe says. “They should have taken him to the hospital, not jail.”

Beebe says he didn’t realize the connection between Danny Dunn and his father: “I heard it on the news after Danny died. He never talked about anything like that.”

Sgt. Glenn Johnson of the Kern County Sheriff’s Department says that a jail nurse examined Danny Dunn when he was booked. He had a variety of scrapes attributed to his bicycle accident and fall down the stairs.

Danny was combative and belligerent, Johnson says. Officers isolated him to give a chance for the alcohol to wear off, but he kept kicking on the door and screaming.

The four officers involved in the incident are still working at the jail, he says. “There’s no indication of anything that would create a suspicion that would put them on administrative leave at this point,” he says.

The release of the autopsy report has been delayed because of time-intensive toxicological tests and a microscopic examination of body tissues, authorities say.

When asked whether the family is planning to file a wrongful-death suit, Nancy Dunn pauses for a long moment. “I really don’t know,” she says finally. “Right now I’m just mourning the death of my son.”

* * *

“Mean Justice” has been a best-seller in Bakersfield bookstores, but that doesn’t translate to a massive swell of community exposure. For example, at the three branches of Russo’s Books, one of the city’s large independent bookstores, about 50 copies of the book were sold the first week.

Besides Patrick Dunn’s murder trial, “Mean Justice” includes a number of examples of what Humes calls prosecutorial misconduct in Kern County, including the famed Bakersfield “Witch Hunt” child-molestation trials of the ’80s. Bakersfield has given too much power to its prosecutors without demanding accountability, Humes says, and it’s a pattern that’s increasing across the country as communities strive to get tougher on crime.

That’s not necessarily a message that resonates.

“The people I’ve been talking to are glad that we’re a tough city on crime,” says Kay Ross, the manager of Russo’s Books at the Marketplace. “I have to be on the side of the justice system because I’ve never had any dealings with it. I’m not a fair judge.”

John Somers, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the Dunn case, called the book a “hit-and-run hatchet job” in a harsh review in the Bakersfield Californian. A unanimous jury shouldn’t be second-guessed, he wrote. (Though no physical evidence linked Patrick Dunn to the murder of his wife, the prosecution produced an eyewitness implicating him.)

* * *

The Dunn family, however, has high hopes for “Mean Justice.” Lawyers for Patrick Dunn, who had previously appealed his murder conviction in 1993, filed a new appeal days after “Mean Justice” was released, citing newly discovered evidence uncovered by the author.

In court documents, Dunn’s lawyers say the prosecutor “concealed the existence of this evidence. It was discovered by the investigative reporter during his research, and now how has been furnished to the defense.”

Although the misfortunes of father and son don’t appear connected, one can’t escape the feeling that the Dunn name will continue to make its mark in Bakersfield.

Jennifer Dunn says it’s hard to find any good in her brother’s death, but perhaps, she says, there’s something bigger here at work.

“The publicity surrounding my brother’s death and the publicity surrounding my father’s case,” she says, “can only help my father in the end.”

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