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See all (15+)The Governor Signed The Reward in 2008 - Bennett came forward only to have his relatives murdered?
Fourteen years later, Garnier's death remains one of three unsolved killings of
San Francisco police officers, and one of a few such murders nationwide. Unsolved murders are more commonplace in San Francisco than in almost any other big American city, as The Chronicle reported last year. But cop killings are another matter. When a San Francisco police sergeant was killed in a terrorist attack in 1971, the department spared no effort tracking his alleged killer across the country.
"The City didn't do right for Lester," said Mike Kemmitt, the department's former lieutenant of vice and Garnier's supervisor. "I always felt like we could have done more, that we could have shaken the bushes, gotten our snitches working. I'm kind of ashamed of myself for not pushing more."
The Garnier investigation has been marked by bureaucratic bungling and intramural warfare among competing law-enforcement agencies. From the day his body was discovered, top brass in the SFPD absolved itself from responsibility in finding Garnier's killer, surrendering jurisdiction to the Walnut Creek Police Department. But San Francisco police officers then questioned the competence of the suburban force, which in turn pointed a finger back at the SFPD.
A theory that fellow officers were involved in Garnier's murder emerged soon after his death. Eyewitnesses saw two blond women at the shooting scene, and Walnut Creek detectives investigated several female law enforcement officers in the Bay Area who fit the descriptions. Over the years, a number of San Francisco police officers - male and female - have come under suspicion, including the man who has risen to second in command of the department, Alex Fagan. In an interview for this article, Assistant Chief Fagan said he was aware of being investigated, but denied any involvement in the killing.
Possible motives for Garnier's killing are abundant. Working undercover busting hookers, johns, addicts and drug dealers, Garnier was privy to a number of sensitive investigations involving everything from a high-class house of prostitution to one of the largest sports bookmaking operations in the country. Federal law enforcement agencies have conducted long-running investigations of corruption inside the SFPD involving Garnier's beat: vice.
Still, law enforcement investigators interviewed recently on both sides of the Bay agree on one thing: Lester Garnier was the victim of a professional killing - most likely by someone he knew and set up by whoever called him during dinner that night.
Nevertheless, after more than 750 interviews, ballistic tests of SFPD police officers' guns and lie detector tests, Walnut Creek investigators have never made an arrest for the killing of Lester Garnier.
"We've lived this for [14] years," said Capt. Robert Perry, a 27-year veteran of the Walnut Creek Police Department. "I'm of the belief that if you work hard enough, long enough, smart enough, you can solve and close the case. That's not been true in this case, so far."
The blue Corvette was parked at an angle across the deserted Woodcreek Shopping Center parking lot in downtown Walnut Creek. Early Monday morning, investigators responded to a call by a mall employee who had discovered a body.
At first the caller thought the driver behind the wheel was unconscious.
Mike Kemmitt, Garnier's lieutenant, had just arrived at San Francisco's Hall of Justice when he received a phone call from a Walnut Creek police officer. "He asked if I had an officer who owned a blue Corvette, and I knew right away it was Les he was talking about," said Kemmitt. "At first, I thought Lester had been in a car accident. Then the officer told me, 'We have a dead body to identify.' "
"His hands were up like he was in the defense position," said Rich Weick, Garnier's sergeant who joined Kemmitt at the roped-off crime scene. "He got shot under the arm [in the stomach] and then he got the coup de grace. Knowing Lester, I think he was going for the killer."
After Garnier's body was identified, investigators took note that the officer's vehicle was unlocked, his window was rolled down and his car keys missing. His wallet and police badge were tucked away in the glove compartment,
and the normally cautious officer had come without his weapon. From a bullet casing left behind, investigators identified the murder weapon as an AMT .380, a small automatic backup weapon that some SFPD officers were known to use. The only other forensics clue was a partial fingerprint lifted from the car. Investigators pieced together from eyewitness accounts that there were two blond women at the murder scene - one of whom was seen leaving the passenger side of Garnier's Corvette. Around 11:30 p.m., the two women drove away in separate cars, a faded blue pickup and a Datsun or a Toyota with carpet or cloth covering the car's rear deck.
Detectives would later search for a connection between the women at the crime scene and the two mysterious phone calls Garnier received the night he was killed. Investigators knew from Garnier's father, who answered the phone, that one of the untraceable calls was placed by a woman.
As Weick left the murder scene that Monday morning, he prepared himself for the job of notifying Garnier's family. "That's probably the toughest job I've had in 30 years," said Weick. "His father, he had a funny look on his face. (He) asked me if Les was hurt. I told him, 'It's worse than that.' He was uncontrollable."
When Garnier's sister, Margo, came home from work that day, an SFPD officer was waiting on her doorstep. "My first reaction was that they were mistaken because he was off duty," she said. "It was terrible. I thought my mother was going to commit suicide."
At the crime scene, Walnut Creek police officers tightly controlled access, and kept most San Francisco police officers at bay. It was during these crucial first 48 hours after the murder that tensions sparked between the two police forces, and within the SFPD's own ranks.
When the SFPD's newly promoted homicide lieutenant Gerald McCarthy heard the news of Garnier's killing, his first impulse was to take his whole unit to the crime scene. "Then I got a call from the deputy chief's office and was told Walnut Creek would handle it. [Lead SFPD homicide inspectors] were mad at me for a year. They thought I made the call," said McCarthy.
"[McCarthy] wasn't lying," said current San Francisco Police Chief Earl Sanders in an interview not long before his promotion last summer. One of two leading homicide inspectors at the ftime, Sanders was known for investigating the infamous 1974 Zebra killings and for making one of the first murder cases using DNA evidence. "My partner [Napoleon Hendrix] and I were regarded as the most experienced investigators, and yet we were directed, 'You two stay out of it.' "
Lt. McCarthy says the order came through the office of Lawrence Gurnett, who was deputy chief at the time. Gurnett says he doesn't recall making that order. But he says the out-of-town jurisdiction of Garnier's killing prevented the SFPD from leading the murder investigation.
"Just because we didn't detail a group of officers to take over the investigation didn't mean we didn't have an interest in the case," said Gurnett, who knew Garnier when the officer was a patrolman at Northern Station.
"We wanted to solve this in the worst way."
Frank Jordan, one-term mayor of San Francisco,was SFPD's police chief at the time. An administrator lacking street experience, Jordan relied heavily on others to run the department, including deputy chief Gurnett.
Today, Jordan washes his hands of any responsibility for the investigation into Garnier's killing. "We did for [Walnut Creek] whatever we could," he said.
"Every week I sat down with my deputy chiefs in leadership meetings and we would go over reports and information, and I remember many, many dead ends."
In the first months of the investigation, the Walnut Creek police force dedicated more than half of its detectives to the Garnier case, the highest- profile case it had ever undertaken. The department eventually worked with a liaison from San Francisco's homicide unit to assist in the investigation. "The results probably would have been the same, but I would have liked to be at the crime scene," said McCarthy, who was appointed as liaison. "Witnesses tell you one thing, but evidence also talks." To this day, many SFPD officers are convinced that if experienced San Francisco homicide inspectors had been allowed to investigate the crime scene, Garnier's killer would have been found. "They wasted so much crucial time," said Kitt Crenshaw, a SFPD sergeant in narcotics at the time and a friend of Garnier's.
Like other officers who worked with Garnier, Crenshaw quickly found himself ensnared in the WCPD's early investigation. Having initially offered his assistance to Walnut Creek detectives, Crenshaw eventually became one of eight San Francisco police officers asked to turn over their weapons for ballistic tests. "My gun was brand new and never even fired," said Crenshaw. "They thought they were dealing with kids."
Walnut Creek's Capt. Perry insists that pursuing ballistic matches on SFPD officers was routine procedure. "It was something we needed to do to eliminate any defenses," said Perry. "It was not based on any suspicions or beliefs we had about any one person." But confidential sources say detectives did suspect an insider hit from the beginning. Garnier's SFPD supervisor Weick says that he understood the basis for that suspicion. "Nobody could be eliminated," he said. "I couldn't be eliminated.
The killer might have been in our ranks."
On the morning that Garnier's body was discovered in Walnut Creek, his best friend, Wisfe Aish, was waiting anxiously for him to arrive at San Francisco's Hall of Justice. That day, the two childhood friends had been planning to pick up a small-business license for a hot-dog cart concession they wanted to start together.
"I didn't hearing anything until after work that day," said Aish. "I called the house and his mother starting crying, 'He's gone. He's gone.' "
By then, the family's priest, neighbors and friends were gathering at the Garnier residence. Walnut Creek investigators scoured the officer's belongings,
desperately looking for clues to his murder. By the time Margo Garnier returned from work, the police had already taken bags and bags of her brother's things, including a surveillance videotape found hidden in his home office.
Vice officers routinely conducted video surveillance in "trick rooms" - wired hotel rooms where they captured prostitutes' solicitations on tape. Those video recordings were under tight lock and key until turned over to city prosecutors. The tape in Garnier's possession appeared to be different in nature, however, according to a source who watched an excerpt of it. Other sources have revealed that the recording was made during an undercover SFPD stakeout from a Fisherman's Wharf hotel. Just prior to the SFPD's investigation, the department's organized crime division had assisted the FBI at the same location on surveillance of a La Cosa Nostra crime family.
In the late '80s, federal agents were tipped off to a new restaurant on the wharf, managed by a family member of Anthony Scotto who headed up the International Longshoreman's Union on the East Coast. Scotto doubled as a capo (or captain) in the Gambino crime family, and was setting up restaurants ostensibly run by his family in New York and San Francisco. From a nearby hotel room, agents watched the Fisherman's Wharf location and took notice of city luminaries attending the restaurant's grand opening. No arrests in the months-long operation were made before the FBI folded the investigation and then turned over the surveillance spot to SFPD, a common practice among law enforcement agencies.
But what remains a mystery is how the SFPD then used the location and why Garnier had hidden a tape recording from that surveillance spot. Confidential sources say the recording may have included sensitive information implicating some of his fellow officers in criminal activity.
Working the streets of San Francisco as a plain-clothes vice officer, Garnier spent his nights working undercover in a netherworld of prostitution, gambling and drugs. The variety and excitement of vice was coveted by patrolmen accustomed to pushing around radio calls all night. "Some guys would probably cut off their little finger to get there," said former lieutenant of vice Mike Kemmitt. "In vice, you get to go out and feel like James Bond."
Garnier had been chosen for the vice beat after four years of patrol at Northern Station, where he had been decorated for bravery during his first year on the job. "When he helped out on search warrants with me, you never had to ask him to do anything. He'd already be doing it," said Vince Repetto, an SFPD inspector who used Garnier on vice operations. "If you are looking for character flaws professionally, you'd have a hard time finding them."
"There are some officers who would use the plain clothes to go goof off. It happens," said Kemmitt. "But Les was never like that, you never had to worry about him."
The 1980s offered no shortage of criminal activity for Garnier's vice squad.
The Asian Wah Ching gang and its rivals controlled the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown, running extortion, gambling and prostitution rackets. The Hells Angels were at war with law enforcement, trafficking millions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin and amphetamines, and America's top bookmaker,
Ron "Cigar" Sacco, used a Mission District pawn shop to funnel millions of dollars a month in sports bets.
With a surge in vice crimes in the 1980s, the temptations for officers also grew. Immediately after Garnier's death, as suspicion spread that another officer had killed him; a bookmaker who was a FBI informant claimed Garnier had discovered fellow cops stealing on raids, according to confidential sources.
Rich Weick, Garnier's supervisor, challenges that allegation. "When we went on raids, the whole unit would go, from lieutenant on down," said Weick. "The money was counted in front of the person getting booked. If stealing happened, it had to be in the first part of the raid. I'm not saying that couldn't happen, but it had to be pretty damn fast."
Theories of a coverup were also compounded by reports that an AMT .380 registered to a female San Francisco police officer or to a federal agent working with the SFPD on special operations was missing.
Eyewitness accounts of the two blonds spotted the night of the killing would also lead Walnut Creek detectives to investigate female law enforcement officers who resembled the police sketch. Detectives' curiosities about one female federal agent with the Internal Revenue Service were heightened when within months of Garnier's investigation her parked car was mysteriously bombed. Some wondered if the bombing - which also occurred in Walnut Creek, where the agent lived - was meant as a message to silence her.
The IRS agent's relationship with a rising star in the SFPD offered another angle for detectives, and eventually they would investigate Alex Fagan, the department's current deputy chief and a prominent, three-decade veteran. Fagan, then a narcotics inspector who had quickly moved up from patrolman, knew the woman from working on organized crime task forces detailed by San Francisco police officers and agents from various federal bureaus. These special operations were prestigious assignments, and due to their covert nature, were often kept secret from fellow officers. Described as a cop's cop by veterans in the department, Fagan was the life of the party on weekend hunting trips with fellow officers. He was well regarded by rank-and-file officers and federal agents, and was eventually promoted to captain at Northern Station, where he would lead the department's fiscal division.
But some in law enforcement questioned Fagan's upscale lifestyle. He lived in a $735,000 home in Orinda in the late '80s and owned half a dozen cars - unusual for a mid-level cop.
Fagan and his assets later became the subject of an internal review by his department, and the WCPD would eventually peruse those records as part of the Garnier investigation. In a phone interview before he was promoted to assistant chief last year, Fagan admitted he was aware of the WCPD's interest in him in connection to Garnier's death. "I found out my name was bantered around as some form of a suspect or as a target," he said. "But I was in South Florida at the time [of the murder] working on an organized crime task force with the FBI. I didn't even know the guy. There's absolutely nothing in the world to tie me to him or his murder."
Evidence of SFPD officers dabbling in what cops refer to as the "dark side" dates back decades. In the 1950s, grand jury testimony uncovered a bookie drop for cops' bets hidden in the main police station. In subsequent decades, officers were exposed for taking bribes from drug dealers and for soliciting prostitutes. A 1970s police corruption probe in Chinatown resulted in one indictment against an undercover cop, but many suspected higher-ranking officers were also accepting payoffs.
Garnier was part of a new guard of officers moving up the ranks in the SFPD,
which had historically been controlled by the Irish and Italians. The Asian officer was among a younger generation of officers who were the first in their families to serve on the force, signaling a change in department culture. But prostitutes and bookies of the era still complained that some undercover officers played their parts a little too well.
Still, the idea of an SFPD "hit" on Garnier's life for some officers amounted to "a lot of Hollywood hype," as SFPD Inspector Daniel Dedet said.
"It's not a corrupt organization with cops on the take like the 1930s Capone movies," said Dedet, who met Garnier during field training. "Most problems here are internal and are written up and reported."
"Seedy cop stories don't happen here in the magnitude they do in Los Angeles or New York," added Lt. Kitt Crenshaw. "Either we're good and get away with it, or we police ourselves pretty well."
On the Friday morning after Garnier was killed, hundreds of San Francisco police officers filed solemnly into Mission Dolores Basilica, where Garnier had once served as an altar boy, to pay their last respects.
Outside the church, a color guard of four horsemen bearing the American flag stood in silent tribute. Pallbearers carrying Garnier's casket moved slowly past his family, his mother visibly distraught and leaning on her daughter for support, while rows of policemen gave the officer his final salute.
But what ended as a moving tribute to a revered officer had begun badly the night before with an outburst at the rosary service. Garnier's ex-girlfriend, whom he had recently broken up with after a tumultuous three-year relationship,
got into a fight with a group of women also in attendance. The incident became more bizarre for friends and family as they recognized the streaked blond ex-girlfriend had dyed her hair black that day. Some wondered whether she did so in response to the eyewitness descriptions of the women at the crime scene.
Margo Garnier had last seen her brother's ex-girlfriend at the family's home on the Sunday afternoon before he was killed, which had surprised her; the couple had been split up for more than a month. Described as possessive of Garnier, the woman was later questioned by Walnut Creek investigators. Her alibi, dinner with her new boyfriend at the Cliff House, was verified by other diners who witnessed the couple get into an argument.
But there were other girlfriends in Garnier's life, according to family, friends and colleagues, who say women flocked to the soft-spoken, attractive man. As closely as investigators tried to chase work motives, they also pursued theories of jealous lovers, following leads deep into Garnier's personal life. After tracing calls on his phone to East Bay massage parlors, detectives concluded Garnier frequented the establishments while off-duty. Rumors of Garnier's so-called dark side spread, and people even speculated that his killer could have been a man in drag.
Margo Garnier defends her brother's integrity and claims he even spent his off-duty time pursuing vice leads. "He was just a young man striving to live a good life, and all they focused on was that he must have been doing something wrong," she said.
By the fall of 1988, just a few months after Garnier's murder, newspaper headlines in San Francisco reported one of the biggest police stings in the city's history. The SFPD's vice unit had staked out a string of brothels operated by a husband-wife duo with family ties in the business dating back at least 100 years and a high-profile client list that turned heads. With all the twists and turns of a pulp-fiction novel, the investigation snared San Francisco lawmakers and the city's elite in a web of sex crimes. It also stirred up another theory about Garnier's killing, linking his work in vice with his rumored off-duty lifestyle.
"A couple of months into the investigation, we realized this was much bigger than we had ever thought," said SFPD Inspector Kelly Carroll, who led the brothel investigation. "It got everyone's attention."
SFPD investigators soon learned the prostitution ring specialized in underage girls recruited on Polk Street by a Bentley-driving pimp. Among the list of high-paying johns was a prominent San Francisco jeweler, millionaire hotelier Donald Werby, and Roger Boas, a former San Francisco supervisor and the city's chief administrative officer under mayors George Moscone and Dianne Feinstein.
Boas was campaigning for San Francisco mayor when investigators were tipped off to the real identity of a regular called "George." Campaign posters of Boas dotted the city, and a prostitute recognized the face of a man who had been soliciting the ring for three years.
Inspector Carroll was preparing warrants for the arrests of brothel operator, Patrick Roberts and his wife, Kelly Loyd, when he requested backup surveillance from Garnier and his partner. "I needed fresh information on [the couple's] comings and goings. Chuck and Les, I knew them as squared away," Carroll said.
Garnier and his partner had therefore been assigned to help Carroll watch Roberts as he moved his house of prostitution from an old brothel in the Mission (which happened to be located on the block where Garnier lived as a child) to a location in the Inner Richmond. After a couple of days of surveillance, Garnier's partner reported that he suspected their covers had been "burned" by Roberts. Two months later, Garnier's body was found.
Carroll dismisses the close timing between Garnier's killing and the investigation of the prostitution ring as coincidence, and he downplays the fact that Garnier and his partner's identity may have been discovered in their surveillance. But others saw a motive in the sequence of events.
"There were rumors spreading about the grand jury investigation and the whole thing percolates," Carroll said. "There's lots of buzz, and it's fertile ground that something secret is going on, and in the same year, here's a vice cop murdered."
Within months of Garnier's killing, a secret grand jury returned indictments on the brothel operators, Roger Boas and seven other customers, including one San Francisco police officer. Rumors connecting Garnier's death to the scandal persisted when the defense attorney for the indicted patrolman, Patrick Miyagishima, claimed his client and Garnier had both attended a Daly City stag party where prostitutes were present. At the alleged time of the party, Miyagishima worked as a security guard in the area, while Garnier served as a reservist for the nearby Broadmoor Police.
Miyagishima was fired from the department, and he now works as a taxicab dispatcher on the graveyard shift. He refused to talk about his relationship, if any, with Garnier. "The media ruined my life," he said. "There are family members I don't talk with to this day. You people twist things around. I won't talk to you … especially if it's about a dead man."
On the 10-year anniversary of Garnier's killing in 1998, then SFPD Police Chief Fred Lau held a press conference announcing the "reopening" of the Lester Garnier investigation. But some of the department's own officers doubted the sincerity of the event.
"It was a mystery to everyone," said Inspector Vince Repetto. "Making a big splash about this resurgent investigation, you are alerting people who might be involved you are doing this. If I was leading an investigation, the last thing I'd do was hold a press conference."
Repetto would soon discover he had inadvertently triggered the reopening of the Garnier case. When Chief Fred Lau announced the new investigation, he pointed to an old SFPD internal memo that had suddenly surfaced. It detailed an informant's sighting of a drug dealer conspiring with an off-duty police officer. The drug dealer was identified as Asian and driving a Corvette.
Then Repetto learned that some fellow officers presumed he was the off-duty officer and Garnier was the Corvette-driving drug dealer. Rumors spread that Repetto might have been Garnier's killer. There was only one problem with the theory: Repetto had written the memo.
"It seemed like a political squeeze to me," he said.
At the time, Repetto and his partner were under management's review for illegal sports-betting charges. The two were preparing to face the Police Commission, but after the officers confessed, the hearings were canceled and Repetto was temporarily suspended. He later filed a lawsuit against the SFPD for slander, but eventually dropped it. In the four years since the obscure memo surfaced, Repetto says he has never been interviewed by investigators about the killing.
Other veteran officers were also critical of the department's motives in reopening the case. "If somebody said it was a sham, they were being kind," said Inspector Kelly Carroll, now assigned to the department's homicide unit. "[The reopening] was a confluence of interests and concerns [that were] largely self-serving. You have this strange brew that turns into trotting on the grave of a dead cop, and as far as I know, Lester Garnier was a good guy and it's a tragedy."
For Garnier's family, it was a tragedy without closure. When the officer's body was first cremated, the family sat his ashes atop the television in the family room. "We talked to that box, even calling, 'It's time for dinner,' " his sister said. "I thought we were losing our minds. The dog waited for him every day. It just broke our heart." Garnier's mother died in 1996, and throughout the eight years between her son's murder and her own death, Jean Garnier was consumed with finding the killer, attending support group meetings for parents of murdered children, consulting psychics and hiring a private detective.
"She said, 'When I get there, I'm going to find out who did it,' " said Margo Garnier. "In some ways, she wanted to get there faster to find out what happened."
Among the men and women who worked with Garnier, Patrolman Chuck Lofgren, his former partner, is described as being closest to him. Garnier's parents treated Lofgren like another son, and when Lofgren became a father himself, he asked his partner to be his son's godfather. Garnier was laid to rest with Lofgren's father's police badge.
When he was approached for this article, Lofgren said that he hasn't given up on avenging Garnier's murder, but that talking about his former partner is still too painful for him.
Margo Garnier sometimes runs into Lofgren at her brother's gravesite. "I think Chuck is so hurt by this," she said. "He felt like he should have been able to do more."
In his 30-year-plus career as a police officer, Rich Weick, Garnier's supervisor, has witnessed officers fall in the line of duty, and while tragic, he says he has learned to come to terms with those experiences. The mystery shrouding Garnier's murder, however, continues to haunt him today. "There isn't a week or month that goes by where I don't think of Lester," said Weick. "Until the killer is found, I'm not going to forget him." Garnier's death has also weighed heavily on the original Walnut Creek investigators whose years of detective work on the case is catalogued in voluminous file cabinets at the department's small police headquarters, within walking distance of the parking lot where Garnier was killed. An air of defeat still fills the room at the mention of Garnier's case.
Soon a new generation of Walnut Creek detectives will inherit the fallen officer's case. One of the original leading investigators retired last fall, and the other is planning retirement. A new team of WCPD investigators won't carry the long history of chasing Garnier's killer, and some say that leaves the burden to intensify efforts on the SFPD.
In an interview before his promotion to police chief, Earl Sanders said he regretted the decisions of his SFPD predecessors, who he says should have done more to help close the Lester Garnier case.
"If one of my officers was killed out of town today, you can damn well bet that we will be active in that investigation," said Sanders. "I would demand to be involved, and we wouldn't leave it to the out-of-town department [to solve it].
"Old homicide cases shouldn't be put away in a drawer," Sanders said. "There are no statutes of limitations for murderers. The three motives for murder are money, love and hate. Somebody has to know what Lester was into."
With Sanders now occupying the top office at SFPD and Alex Fagan second in command, the old guard of officers who once served with Garnier is now in a unique position to redirect efforts to solve the case. But Sanders is distracted by police probes involving Fagan's son, and some anticipate the police chief will soon retire, meaning another administration may pass through San Francisco's Hall of Justice without closing the city's only unsolved killing of an officer.
Margo Garnier has marked the many years since her brother's death with a quiet, determined patience. Her father died last year, so she now carries on her brother's memories alone. She fears she will never know what happened on that July night. "Everyone wants to own this investigation," she said, "but no one really wants to do anything."
The Young Garnier
Lester Garnier grew up on the same streets he would later work as a vice cop. He was raised by working-class parents in the heart of the Mission District. Gang violence took the lives of more than one of his neighborhood friends.
"Lester could hold his own," said Margo Garnier, his only living relative. Lester and Margo's father had managed professional boxers, and passed on to his children a scrappy toughness. Both were trained in the martial arts from an early age. Garnier attended Mission Dolores Elementary and the parochial Riordan High School, alma mater of many San Francisco police cadets. He got his first job at age 12 as a peer counselor at Columbia Park Boys Club. He represented the club at a White House visit, during which he met President Gerald Ford and then Sen. Walter Mondale.
Between summers in high school, Garnier juggled several jobs. He was savvy when it came to earning money, hiring neighborhood friends to handle deliveries on his first newspaper route. By the time he was 17, Garnier had bought himself a Camaro, and four years later, he purchased a house for his parents. "He was always angling," said his sister. "If there was something he wanted, he'd zero in on it and figure out what he needed to do to get it." Religion also had a strong presence in his family. Garnier was an altar boy at Mission Dolores Basilica, and growing up, he talked about becoming a priest.
"He made you feel comfortable and at the same time, if you were up to no good, he'd know," said Margo Garnier. "He looked a little further [into people] than most."
-- C.H. and K.W.
The Unlikely Fate of Attorney John Nejedly
Family History
Son of Senator John A. Nejedly
Former City Attorney of Walnut Creek
Former District Attorney
