Read the full story on Richard Oakes’ death in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to Keep You Rooted. When activist Richard Oakes was shot and killed in 1972 at the age of 30, he was well known for the famous occupation of Alcatraz that would kick off the native civil rights movement. The impact of his death is still felt today. Oakes His family has been traumatized and hasn’t felt like they’ve gotten closure. And Oakes, His legacy is largely unrecognized in mainstream American history. In our last episode, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Julie Johnson and Jason Fagone talked about what brought Richard Oakes to rural Sonoma County.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We talked about Michael Morgan, the man who killed Richard, and we learned about FBI documents that have been kept secret for decades that show how local police goaded Michael Morgan into violence days before he pulled the trigger. If you haven’t listened to part one of this two part story, go back and do that first, because today we sit down with Julie and Jason again to bring you up to speed on the day that Michael Morgan shot and killed Richard Oakes. We hear from the investigator who was on the scene right after it happened and we discuss how the trial that followed was botched. Stay with us. Julie, what happens in their second encounter with one another? How do they meet again?
Julie Johnson: So they meet again because Richard was back on the road looking for a kid. Billy Lazor, He didn’t return home, but it turns out Michael Morgan caught Billy and another kid poking around one of the horse tack barns and essentially forces him into his car at gunpoint. And Billy later says this is during trial that Michael Morgan had threatened to blow his head off. So Morgan takes Billy back to the camp. He makes like a citizen’s arrest for attempted horse theft, calls the sheriff’s office.
Julie Johnson: Billy goes to jail. So it’s the next day and Richard’s out walking on Skaggs Springs Road looking for Billy. And he encounters Michael Morgan, who had just walked up to the road. He had been shoeing horses. So they’re both standing there. They’re maybe ten feet, 20 feet apart from each other, and they talk. It’s actually for a while, maybe two or 3 minutes. And then Morgan takes out a pistol and shoots Richard.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Michael Morgan fired one shot from a concealed pistol that struck Richard Oaks in the heart, killing him instantly. When an investigator showed up at the scene, Morgan said that Oaks took him by surprise from behind the trees, asked him what happened to the boy, and then threatened to kill him. Morgan claimed that Oakes crouched down and lunged forward, at which point Morgan, fearing for his life, shot oaks in self-defense. But the investigator wasn’t so sure about this story. And I know you actually spoke with the detective, Edwin “Butch” Carlstedt. Did this detective buy Morgan’s version of events.
Julie Johnson: Butch is a really seasoned homicide detective. He’d worked a lot of really serious cases. And so, you know, he shows up to the scene, they actually fly there in a helicopter, and he talks to Morgan. And when he got to the scene, he saw that Richard was laying on his back.
Edwin “Butch” Carlstedt: Richard had no weapons on him at all, nothing.
Julie Johnson: That he was ten, maybe 20 feet away from. Morgan said he was standing. And that just didn’t make sense.
Edwin “Butch” Carlstedt: I went over across that bank over there because there was the exit wound on him. And I found that bullet. The bullet from the gun I found right over there.
Julie Johnson: But I thought, well, if he was lunging toward you, wouldn’t he fall forward when he was shot? Butch recalled something else at the scene that really stuck with him for 50 years. And that’s Morgan’s demeanor. So Morgan gave a statement. They had him write it out. They were preparing that paperwork on the side of the road. And Morgan asked him, Butch remembered, Can I go home now? And Butch thought that was strange.
Edwin “Butch” Carlstedt: He thought he was going to just be released and nothing happened.
Julie Johnson: You know, most people, when you’ve just killed someone, you’re distraught or even if you’re calm, it’s unusual for someone to assume they can just go home, that it’s over. And so his suspicion began from there.
Edwin “Butch” Carlstedt: You can’t shoot somebody and not face consequences. You’ve got to be a hearing.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Butch. Carlstedt wasn’t actually the only one, right, who was suspicious of Morgan’s account. As I understand it, the deputy D.A., Edward Krug, seemed to agree that something was off, too. Right.
Jason Fagone: It’s the crew of the story that Morgan was telling just did not add up.
Edward Krug: Morgan was there. I think he was in a more wrongful way than Richard Oakes.
Jason Fagone: Morgan Central claim was he shot Richard Oakes in a moment of panic, an overwhelming fear that he was about to die. But the picture painted by the evidence is just not a picture of someone who is credibly afraid for their own life. At the moment, the shot is fired. It’s a picture of that’s much calmer. That’s much more about choice. The shot was fired from at least ten feet away. So it’s not like there was any moment of hand-to-hand combat. Richard was always unarmed. Morgan always had a concealed pistol.
Edward Krug: He went there with a gun. He had the advantage.
Jason Fagone: A bit later, Crook was able to speak with a man who had been visiting the YMCA camp in the days before the killing. He was having coffee with Morgan. He asked, Is it hunting season for anything? He said that, Morgan replied. It was hunting season for coons, foxes and Indians. And this visitor said that. The conversation went on. Morgan continued to talk about Oakes and how much he didn’t like. Richard Oakes said that Morgan called Oakes half crazy and said that he would be better off dead. That’s five days before the killing.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, let’s talk about the trial of Michael Morgan. Jason, how does the DA’s office go about charging Morgan, given their skepticism of his account of what happened?
Jason Fagone: Initially, the DA’s office wanted to charge him with murder, but they ran into some resistance from a county judge. This judge was very dismissive of the idea that it could have been murder, and he tossed out the possibility of a murder charge. I think the other thing is that they were really worried about the kind of jury that they would get. Could you talk to us about this a lot?
Edward Krug: My concern was picking a jury.
Jason Fagone: You knew that in 1972, 1973, in Sonoma County, it was probably gonna be an all white jury.
Edward Krug: I said, there’s a white all white jury here. I didn’t think that was fair.
Jason Fagone: He just couldn’t be sure that a white jury would convict a white defendant for murdering a native person, any native person, but particularly a native person like Richard Oaks, who because of his prominence and because of his protest in the county, he had he had become perceived as scary and threatening to some people in the county at the time. And Krug thought a lot about that, and he worried about it. And it it sort of determined the shape of their strategy in a lot of ways.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: How did prosecutors argue the case?
Jason Fagone: So it ended up being a trial for manslaughter, both involuntary, voluntary. To get a conviction, the prosecutors just had to show that his story about killing out of self-defense in this panic was was bogus. And the main way that they did that was by pointing out all of the contradictions between the physical evidence, the crime scene evidence, and Morgan’s own story that he told police that the evidence showed he was lying. Morgan took the stand in his own defense to cross-examine him and really kind of put the screws to him, to the point where Morgan even changed his story multiple times in court during the trial.
Jason Fagone: But there would have been another way to show that it was an unlawful killing. Right. Which is to talk about Morgan’s motive, to argue that he was motivated by racism. Right. So crew could have said this wasn’t about self-defense, this is about hatred. But to really do it effectively, he would have needed to put race and racism at the forefront of of the arguments, at the forefront of the trial and for other reasons that we that we already talked about his concerns about a jury, the environment in the country at the time. He he just didn’t do that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And Julie, I know you you and Jason also talked with Krug about sort of his thoughts on how he went about arguing this case. And it sounded like he had some regrets. Is that right?
Julie Johnson: Yeah, I think we were both really surprised at how quickly he admitted, you know, I think I screwed up. But he was also really frank with the challenges that he faced. And just to give you a little contrast, he was up against really experienced attorneys. Crew, I think, was four years into being a prosecutor. And Michael Morgan hired a really stellar defense team.
Jason Fagone: And yeah, the Berkeley Y put out the call. They found the two best Catholic defense attorneys in Sonoma County, literally the guys who ran the County Bar Association and helped judges get elected and were inextricably tied to the Democratic Party political machine in Sonoma County. He got the best attorneys in the business, right?
Julie Johnson: And there was Kruh who was still pretty green, although he tried felony cases really early in his career. There were small things that he felt like he missed, like he realized at some point during the trial that he had neglected to get some of Richard’s clothing, including his pants analyzed. And, you know, if there were scuff marks on his knees, what does that say about the way that Richard maybe fell forward and then fell back? These details really haunted him 50 years later when he spoke about what he could have done to get the outcome that he really thought was just.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And, Julie, earlier we talked about these FBI witness statements that really, I think, reveal some of the racism that was really at play in this case. Does Krug and the DA’s office know about all these FBI statements that we talked about earlier? And do do they come up at all?
Julie Johnson: You know, I think they knew some of what the FBI was learning and they did not have the full report. I don’t believe they had the full picture. But Krug did know about what Mike Craver, a sheriff’s deputy, said and what witnesses corroborated, he said. One thing he said is that to put the deputy I understand all the deputy has to do is say, well, I don’t remember that. I didn’t say that. And a jury is really traditional even to this day. The jury juries want to believe police officers. Another thing that he worried about when thinking about bringing race into the center of the trial was whether he was willing or the county the DA’s office was willing to to portray a law enforcement officer as racist. That was really not his job. He felt, to make the public question law enforcement officers who are out there protecting them.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So much of that did not make it into the trial, it sounds like.
Jason Fagone: Yeah, I think a lot of the most important things that happened in the six days before the killing were never aired during the trial of Michael Morgan. We now know that they happened because we have these documents, but at the time, the jury never heard about a lot of these things. And the public certainly didn’t hear about a lot of these things.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And you both actually talked to some of these jurors, at least the ones who are still alive today. What do they remember of this trial?
Julie Johnson: Their memories of the trial, I think, were so telling. I spoke to two jurors and they both remembered how well the defense portrayed Michael Morgan as like just an American dad, nervous about his family, uncomfortable with this powerful figure who had kind of appeared and intruded upon his life. And, you know, I think they really identified with him as a family man. But in particular, one juror I spoke with, he also said things that frankly illuminated how much bias existed then and exists today toward indigenous people.
Julie Johnson: He said, Oh, I remember that Richard, you know, had children with all these different women and, you know, was shooting flaming arrows toward the camp. Well, that is just like a complete fabrication. And none of that was presented at trial. None of that actually happened. I don’t know why he has those memories, but I can only imagine that that is the kind of lens that these jurors had, based on whatever was in the movie, is portraying Native Americans at the time of what kind of person had been killed in this situation.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, Jason, what did jurors ultimately decide?
Jason Fagone: They acquitted Morgan on both of the manslaughter counts. Not guilty verdicts, took them about three days and that was it. Morgan was set free.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, we hear from Richard Oakes, his family, and how his legacy still lives on today.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What about Richard Oakes, his family? Julie, how do they talk about the impact of his killing? I know you actually spoke with his daughter recently, right?
Julie Johnson: Fawn Oaks is Richard’s youngest daughter.
Fawn Oakes: My mom never talked about him.
Julie Johnson: She’s now 53 years old and she was a toddler when he was killed. And she was actually present on September 14th when Michael Morgan fired the warning shot above Richard’s head. She was there. She was a little child at the side. She really feels so strongly that the country, the world, should understand what her father was about and what he did and how important he was at such a young age. You know, only 30, and he had done so much.
Fawn Oakes: My father was educated and smart and courageous, who was more than people can handle. And they shut them down for the fine oaks.
Julie Johnson: And her son, Elijah Oaks, who’s Richard’s grandson, they really talked about how their family has always felt that the acquittal invalidated how awful his death was.
Elijah Oakes: I think racism played a big part in the entire situation and the entire deal. They don’t want unity between people. We’re not true unity. And I think that’s the message that was sent when they killed my own grandfather.
Julie Johnson: And they felt robbed. Fine. Grew up without a father. Any need to raise children without her husband. And in fact, the story that lasted was just some small argument between two men. But they felt always that Richard was targeted because of his activism, because of his politics, and because of his identity.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Is Michael Morgan still around? And did you hear anything from him for this story?
Julie Johnson: Michael Morgan is alive. He’s 84. He lives in Oklahoma. We sent in letters and received no response. We called and left messages, the response. And, you know, we really wanted to hear from him and include his perspective. And Jason, actually, he flew to Oklahoma and knocked on his door.
Jason Fagone: I could see him through the screen door. Then he sort of stood up, slowly came to the door and he said, I got your letters. Don’t want to talk. And I tried to make this case to him that whatever it whatever he had to say, it was important for history. But he just nodded his head and he said, you know, it was a sad thing that happened. And then he went inside and closed the door. And I went back the next day, but he was gone.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What I think is so important about your story is the way that it sort of reframes what we know about this killing. And Jason, I can’t help but think, you know, what if. Right. Like, what if these details in your reporting were shared at the trial? What if the trial had turned out differently? What is, you think, the impact of the fact that so many of these details have been kept secret until now?
Jason Fagone: Yeah, I think about that a lot. It’s I it’s hard to know exactly because, you know, you can’t rerun history, right? I mean, maybe the jury would still have acquitted Morgan, even if all of this stuff had been a part of the trial and been public. I don’t know. But but I am really certain, like 100% certain, that if these documents had been available at the time to the public, it would have made a difference if they’d been available to the native community. I have to think that there would have been a lot of pressure on the local police department, on the DOJ to find out what really happened here and to keep investigating.
Jason Fagone: Right. Like there would have been much more of a spotlight. But because a lot of this was concealed and covered up, there was no one really watching. And so it was able to just be buried. And that has had an enormous impact on Richard’s legacy because it kind of erased him. There’s an alternate history where his song gets sung along with the song of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. There’s a version of history where there’s a big Hollywood movie about Richard and his life, but he never joined that sort of great pantheon of civil rights heroes who were assassinated for what they believed in and became martyrs to their cause and inspirations for generations that came after. Right. And that’s because the trial was so botched and so muddy. His story just is not known in the way that it really, really deserves to be.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: His story is buried, but it also seems like it’s not too late to remember and learn about his contributions to the native civil rights movement.
Jason Fagone: It’s definitely not too late. If you go back and you read a lot of the news coverage of the end of the Alcatraz occupation when protesters were forcibly removed from the island. The whole thing was portrayed as a big failure, but it was actually a huge success because it sparked this whole red power movement that ended up having this enduring impact on on US law and the way that the US government deals with native tribes.
Jason Fagone: Even today, this protest movement that was launched in the wake of his killing, the Trail of broken treaties proved to be enormously influential on U.S. policy and law. They brought a list of demands to the federal government, and a number of those demands were over the next decades, you know, gradually adopted and passed as law, treating tribes as sovereign nations. Today, that’s normal. At the time when Richard was talking about that, he was portrayed as some kind of wild eyed radical.
Julie Johnson: You know, how much did you learn about Alcatraz when you were in grade school? How much did I learn about it? We ever hear his name before at all? Exactly. But what a unique example he is for young people. Taking what he’d heard from elders on the reservation near the Canadian border. You know, there were land fights happening there. You know, he grew up hearing those stories and and brought that across the country and joined this roiling hotbed of counterculture and civil rights. And, you know, these types of stories are really illuminating about history.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And that journey to Alcatraz here in the Bay Area still happens every year.
Jason Fagone: Every year there are sunrise ceremonies in October and November where Alcatraz veterans, friends and family of Richard Knox, they go back to the islands to give thanks, to honor the memories of their loved ones and keep the spirit of Alcatraz alive.
*recording playing*.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Julie Johnson and Jason Fagone. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your reporting. I really appreciate it.
Julie Johnson: Thank you.
Jason Fagone: Thank you.
