East Mountain murder cases remain officially unsolved

You didn’t have to be a particularly morbid person to be invested in the outcome of this week’s East Mountain triple-murder trial. You just had to have lived in Albuquerque in late May 1999, when three high school athletes were found dead in their car, riddled with bullets at a quiet East Mountain intersection.

The murders of Kevin Shirley, Matthew Hunt, both 17, and Luis Garcia, 16, scared people because the deaths were so violent and seemingly so arbitrary. The mystery surrounding the killing of the boys grew into near legend as the case went unsolved for seven years.

Then, in 2006, many were relieved when Albuquerque police arrested a drifter named Brandon Craig and finally affixed a motive to the murders. According to police, Craig killed the teens because one of them owed his girlfriend $500 for drugs. It seemed possible that the nagging murder mystery was finally solved.

So after a visibly angry jury announced Wednesday that they’d found Craig not guilty of gunning down the three boys, I found nothing but disappointment from everyone who’d ever even heard of the case.

No matter if the prosecution didn’t produce physical evidence tying Craig to the murders. No matter if the three alleged eyewitnesses to the crime were almost comically unbelievable.

It’s 10 years later, the trial is over, and the East Mountain murders are still officially unsolved.

I wanted to talk to somebody who understood the whole sweep of the case, from the night the shots were fired to the second the verdict was announced. I wanted to know why the case was so important to Albuquerque — and why Brandon Craig walked.

So I talked to Joline Gutierrez Krueger, the reporter who covered the case from the beginning for The Albuquerque Tribune. Now a reporter for The Albuquerque Journal, Gutierrez Krueger is also a stringer for the national cable channel truTv (formerly Court TV), which, at her suggestion, sent a crew to Albuquerque to cover the trial live.

Gutierrez Krueger spoke about the case several times during the trial broadcasts, including Thursday.

What made the trial so compelling to people in Albuquerque was exactly what made it interesting to a national audience, Gutierrez Krueger said.

“The case resonated because these three boys were like so many of our sons: not perfect but not the “bad kids,” not the gangster kids on the fringes but kids we could imagine being friends with our own kids. And it happened in a place where we could not imagine such violence. It wasn’t just a killing, it was overkill. In those early days, we could not imagine how it was that this had happened to these boys in that place. It made no sense, and because of that, it was frightening.”

Allegations that the murders were prompted by a drug debt one of the teens owned to Craig’s alleged girlfriend at the time provided a bit of unwanted seediness to the case, said Gutierrez Krueger, who has spent many hours over the years interviewing the families. But it never overshadowed the fact that the boys were essentially good kids, she said.

“Joan [Shirley] once told me that the families had always agreed that if it ever came out that one of the boys had essentially motivated someone to kill them because of something they did, that it would not matter. So when Kevin’s pot usage and supposed drug debt came out as the motive, the families stayed firm on that. They were not ashamed. It was what it was. As the mother of three teenagers, I completely understood that,” said Gutierrez Krueger.

“For the drug part, I do think that some media folks overplayed that in terms of the victims. Joan Shirley has always been candid about her son’s issue with pot. He was one of those kids you might think of as a pothead but not in the debilitating, nefarious way. I have never doubted that any of these three boys would have come out OK had they lived.”

As a truTv insider, Gutierrez Krueger was privy to plenty of opinions — legal and otherwise — about how local prosecutors tried their ultimately unsuccessful case against Craig.

“Albuquerque came off fairly well, but I will say that the prosecutors were largely brutalized by some of the (truTv) viewers. I do not think this was completely fair, but I also was a bit perplexed with some of the holes they left in their case.”

No kidding. Even a casual viewer couldn’t help but notice the unreliability of the witnesses and the lack of physical evidence presented against Craig. And the out-of-state team of defense lawyers, including one-time Kobe Bryant defense attorney Pamela Mackey, made sure jurors noticed.

The jury foreman later told reporters they thought Craig was the shooter but that the state failed to make the case.

“I do believe that many jurors wanted to convict Craig but the conflicts in the stories and lack of corroboration [meant that the conviction] was simply not there,” said Gutierrez Krueger diplomatically.

The families of the victims, as well as Brandon Craig’s family, refused to speak with reporters after the announcement of the verdict Wednesday just after 5 p.m. Craig walked out of jail at around 7 p.m., free after two and one-half years.

Gutierrez Krueger said she “tends to agree” with those who think the right people were fingered in this case.

“Some cases simply are not provable, and I think that rightly or wrongly, Brandon Craig will always have this cloud of suspicion over his head, and there will always be those who think he got away with something largely because he could pay for some high-powered attorneys.”

As Bernalillo County District Attorney Kari Brandenburg noted Wednesday, Craig can never be tried again for the murders — even if he confesses.

Wednesday’s verdict may be unsatisfying, but it’s worth remembering that under our legal system, it’s an achingly reasonable outcome for the case we all wanted to see solved.