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William McCay
Gary Eye, 21, and Steven Sandstrom, 22, each were convicted of four federal felonies that carry sentences of either death or life in prison without possibility of parole.
Just after U.S. District Judge Ortrie Smith read the verdicts, Yvonne McCay, mother of victim William McCay, choked back tears as she left the courtroom. She has attended the trial since it opened almost two weeks ago.
“This is the best Mother’s Day present I’ve had in a long time,” she said.
Prosecutors declined to comment pending the outcome of the trial’s sentencing phase, which opens Monday morning.
Though homeless, McCay had been trying to turn his life around. The Air Force veteran had participated in a recovery program, was working a full-time job and had been saving money so he could move into a place with his girlfriend.
Prosecutors alleged that the assault and murder violated McCay’s civil right to walk down a Kansas City street unmolested because of his race. McCay was black. Eye and Sandstrom are white.
Criminal prosecutions for racially-motivated crimes are rare in western Missouri and throughout the country. In one such case, federal prosecutors in Kansas City convicted a Rushville, Mo., man and his brother a decade ago for burning a cross in the front yard of a woman and her family.
Nationally, more than 7,700 hate-crime incidents were reported in 2006. More than half involved racial bias, according to the Department of Justice. Only three involved homicides.
The prosecution of Eye and Sandstrom is unusual in that it defined using a public street as a “federally protected activity” covered by civil rights laws.
In addition to capital convictions for civil rights murder, firearms violations and witness tampering, Eye and Sandstrom were judged guilty of arson and obstruction of justice for burning a car used in the early morning shooting at Ninth Street and Brighton Avenue on March 9, 2005.
Jurors convicted Eye of an initial assault on McCay just before the murder and a firearms violation related to that assault. The jury acquitted Sandstrom on those counts.
Jurors also convicted Sandstrom of threatening to retaliate against a federal witness.
Lawyers for Eye and Sandstrom never argued that their clients were blameless in McCay’s death. They contended, however, that race played no role in the killing, which should have been treated as a state murder case rather than a federal civil rights matter.
Prosecutors, however, presented evidence from former friends and associates of both men showing they had used harsh racial slurs before and after the shooting to describe their intended target.
Many of those associates also noted that the men also often used a less harsh variant of the epithet, common in rap and hip-hop culture, to describe their friends.
In closing arguments Wednesday, Eric Gibson, a federal civil rights prosecutor, ridiculed the idea that Eye and Sandstrom were using that term in a friendly way to describe McCay.
“Nigga is ‘my friend,’ ‘my associate,’ ‘my homie,’ … none of which is William McCay when they met him March 9, 2005,” Gibson said. “In his final thoughts, he must have wondered, “Why?’ ”
Racial element or not, McCay’s murder bore the hallmarks of a methamphetamine-fueled thrill killing.
One witness testified that Eye and Sandstrom had been up and smoking methamphetamine for up to three days before the murder. Evidence showed that after stealing cars in the Northland and in Raytown, Eye, Sandstrom and associate Regennia Rios headed to a Northeast area car lot to take some audio equipment.
Along the way, they spotted McCay, whom they did not know, walking to his job at a plastics company about 6 a.m. near the intersection of Ninth Street and Spruce Avenue. There, Eye stuck a gun out the window of a stolen car and fired several shots. Sandstrom then pulled away.
Rios, who testified under a grant of immunity, said she told Sandstrom to turn back so they could finish off McCay because he could testify against them.
They found McCay several blocks east. There, according to Rios’ testimony, Eye left the car, met McCay in the middle of the street, and shot him in the side of his chest.
McCay staggered to a chain-link fence, collapsed and soon died.
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