Incarceration Reporting Initiative
Shot in the head and just out of a five-month coma, 20-year-old Mario Carr, a young Black man, could barely nod his head when Long Beach police first interviewed him. Even so, he would go on to become LA County prosecutors’ star witness. Investigators would come to rely almost exclusively on his testimony, even as they failed to follow up on other leads and evidence. A patchwork of limited evidence and conflicting eyewitness statements should have flagged reasonable doubt in prosecutors’ minds. Yet together, the flimsy evidence would be crucial in “winning” the attempted murder case against the defendant, Erica Johnson, a Black woman. This three-part series examines the case, the science of brain injuries, and the apparent cognitive biases that led to Johnson’s conviction and life sentence.
Two days after Christmas 2011, just before 10 PM, fire and rescue personnel in Long Beach, California, responded to a 911 call in the alleyway between Molino and Ohio Avenues. A young Black man lay on the pavement, moaning, face up in a pool of blood and vomit.
After finding the victim suffering from a single gunshot wound to the back of his head, rescue personnel called for police. The nature of the injury, and the uncertainty around whether the victim would survive, demanded the incident be treated like a homicide.
Two homicide detectives, along with numerous uniformed patrol officers, were dispatched to the scene, the surrounding area, and the hospital where the victim, then-19-year-old Mario Carr, was being treated.
So were multiple gang detectives. A map of Los Angeles-area gangs identifies the area as within the bounds of East Side Longos territory, and one detective’s report referred to the crime as a “hit shooting.”
Limited Evidence
Unconscious and on a respirator, Carr couldn’t be immediately interviewed. The contents of his pockets — a toothbrush, 26 cents, a candy wrapper, and a business card — didn’t yield much information of value.
How Carr’s identity was determined is unclear from police reporting. Detectives would later find his wallet and ID with his clothes inside a large plastic bag in the apartment where he was staying. The bag contained no other items of evidentiary value.
Carr didn’t own a cell phone that would’ve provided a neatly packaged summary of everyone he’d talked to or texted with in the hours leading up to the shooting. Instead, it would turn out, he used either his sister’s or her boyfriend’s phones to make and receive calls and access his social media accounts.
During knock and talk interviews conducted by Long Beach patrol officers, multiple residents in surrounding apartments reported hearing a “pop” sound. Four residents recognized it as a single gunshot; one witness, a military veteran, identified the shot as having come from a low-caliber weapon. Later, a bullet casing found at the scene would be identified as a .25-caliber W-W (Winchester Western), confirming his assessment.
None of these residents said they had heard any activity such as a fight or moving vehicles. Nor had anyone seen much. Only the couple who had made the initial 911 call, Lisa Zahler and Jaime Reyes, reported seeing a suspicious-looking, 6-foot-tall man walking away from the scene.
Video surveillance did not yield any insights either. Detectives would later learn that of the five cameras installed in the general area of the crime scene, only one was in working order. Attempts to retrieve the video, a detective testified, were unsuccessful.
The First Lead
Homicide detectives Don Goodman and Scott Lasch tracked down the victim’s sister, Jessica Carr, then living in Long Beach with their mother, Lashone Haywood.
Carr told Lasch and Goodman that Mario had been staying with her boyfriend, Terrill Coates, on Coronado Avenue in Long Beach’s East Side neighborhood, several blocks away from the crime scene.
She offered the case’s first lead: Just after being notified of the shooting, Coates had told her he’d last seen Mario with a neighbor, Matt Clanton, a white man who lived behind Coates in the same duplex. Around 8 PM, Mario had gotten into Clanton’s vehicle, a gray Jeep, and the two had driven off together to an “unknown location.” It was the last time Coates saw Mario.
Coates would later confirm Carr’s account, adding that Clanton wanted Mario’s help walking his dogs to a nearby public park. Additionally, Coates said, Clanton approached him after the shooting to tell him Mario planned “to mess with a girl in the area” later that evening.
Although Coates said he didn’t know the name of the “girl,” 15 minutes prior to leaving, Mario had used Coates’ phone to call a woman named Porchea, whose name and phone number detective Goodman noted in his report.
Mario, his sister then told detective Lasch, had had trouble with Clanton. The previous month, November, she’d overheard Mario and Clanton talking about a gun, which Mario wanted to obtain from Clanton “for protection purposes,” Lasch’s report reads.
“Carr said she heard Clanton tell the victim the gun he had wasn’t a toy and was best used for close range headshots,” Lasch wrote. Although Mario had exchanged his vehicle for the gun, his sister never saw the weapon and believed he had ultimately reversed the transaction.
Carr’s next statement was even more concerning. About a week prior to the shooting, Mario had called her about a different incident: He had seen Clanton “assault a man with a baseball bat and break his ribs” before demanding Mario steal the man’s vehicle.
Mario refused, and Clanton — who, Mario had told his sister, was a recovering heroin addict who participated in martial arts and owned three pit bull dogs, multiple firearms, baseball bats, knives, and ballistic armor — was angry. Mario, Carr told Lasch, was afraid for his safety.
Mario’s ex-girlfriend, Carnisha Lambert, confirmed that Clanton had shown Mario “several large firearms” during a visit at his residence about a week prior to the shooting, though she provided no further details.
Police accounts conflict regarding their followup with Clanton. Clanton is listed as an “other contacted person” in Lasch’s report from the same day he and Goodman spoke with Haywood, Carr, and Lambert.
However, the case file contains no record of any conversations or attempts to reach out. Goodman’s report mentions only a “previous cell number.” At trial, he testified that although he and Lasch “started doing research on Mr. Clanton,” they never followed up. “We were going to do that,” he said on cross examination, “but we had not done it at this time.”
Whether detectives’ research on Clanton included his recent history is unclear. Given what Carr had relayed about him, they might have been interested to learn what had happened since Clanton, once a professional baseball pitcher drafted in 2002 by the Chicago Cubs in the first round, was released from his contract.
Beset over three and a half years by injuries ranging from elbow tendinitis to two separate shoulder surgeries, a knee injury, and a lower back strain, Clanton was, according to an article dated May 2006, bitter.
The “once-promising right-hander … accuses the Cubs of not only ruining his baseball career, but his life,” the story reads. “He claims they accused him of faking injury to avoid playing and that he was the victim of repeated verbal abuse by the Cubs’ front office.”
The article doesn’t mention drug use or abuse, nor a traumatic head injury of the kind common among both pitchers and catchers. But Clanton reportedly exhibited what could be interpreted as signs of paranoia. The 2006 article described how he “lived in constant fear of the Cubs and … even felt the organization knew of all phone calls he was making.”
Even before this, Clanton had had a volatile disposition. He’d quit his high school varsity team in his senior year after struggling mentally with diminishing pitching velocity, which he was afraid would hurt his chances for being drafted. Later, during a college playoff game in which his shoulder hurt, he prematurely quit the game.
Thirty years old at the time of the shooting, the blond, blue-eyed Clanton stood just over 6 feet tall. “He never got into any real trouble,” a former coach was quoted as saying. “He came from a good family and had good parents.”
A Different Line of Inquiry
But Goodman seemed more interested in a different person of interest: Erica Johnson, whom he’d identified from Mario’s Facebook profile sometime earlier in the day, before approaching Mario’s family.
Johnson, a young Black woman, was one of only two friends associated with Mario’s account. The other was his twin sister, Jasmine Jackson, whose family was stationed with the U.S. Army in Japan at the time of the shooting. Johnson had left what Goodman described in one of his reports as a “non-threatening” comment on Mario’s page.
For Goodman, learning that Mario’s only other Facebook friend besides his twin lived so close to the crime scene “sparked our curiosity,” according to his report.
At his request, Carr and Lambert, Mario’s ex-girlfriend, offered additional details about Johnson: she was “from a Los Angeles gang neighborhood,” sold cocaine, and had recently been robbed of her drug supply, according to Goodman’s report.
(During a phone interview for this report, Johnson said she doesn’t know where Jessica Carr got the idea that she was selling cocaine. The two women had smoked cannabis together a handful of times; they agreed they both liked ecstasy. Mario had obtained both from Johnson, but she says it was more about fun than a harder addiction.)
Carr also recounted a conversation with Mario several weeks previously, in which he told her Johnson had “teased” him with a gun.
The following day, Goodman reported, he printed out Johnson’s Facebook profile picture. He and Lasch then returned to the area of 1011 Ohio Avenue, asking locals if they could identify her. One man told them her name was Erica, and she lived at 1011 Ohio, #10.
For all the patrol officers’ thoroughness documenting their efforts to knock and talk to residents at both 1011 Ohio and the building across the alleyway, 1010 Molino Avenue, Johnson’s apartment is the only one missing from police reports, a fact confirmed by Goodman during trial testimony.
Johnson says she saw uniformed officers talking to her neighbors but doesn’t recall any knocks on her own door that night. Still, apartment manager Alina Valdez told Goodman and Lasch that Johnson hadn’t answered the door when patrol officers knocked on it.
Speaking to patrol officers the night of the shooting, Valdez had said she hadn’t been home during the incident and couldn’t provide much information. To Goodman and Lasch,she said she remembered Johnson talking to a Black man in front of the apartments. She added she’d also seen Johnson talking on a cell phone.
Goodman reached out to Johnson via Facebook asking to speak with her. The following day, via phone, Johnson agreed to an interview at her apartment.
Like Matt Clanton, Erica Johnson came from a good family, close-knit with her mother and younger sister. She’d grown up just north of Long Beach in Paramount, away from the shadow of gang violence. “My mom, she provided for us good,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “My mom and my sister, it was just us three and … we didn’t want for anything. … My mother always had a condo or a townhouse, and she raised us very well.”
Still, Johnson, an honor roll student, struggled to answer her mother’s questions about what she wanted to do with her life. “She used to put a piece of paper in front of me. It would say ‘Erica, dot dot. Where do you see yourself in five years? Dot, dot, dot. Ten years, dot dot. Fifteen, and so on and so forth.
“And I would never answer it. … I was just content with hanging out and smoking weed and just being in my twenties and having fun. I didn’t have any type of real ambition or any career goals, anything like that. I just went with the flow [without] a set goal in mind.”
The “flow” ultimately included charges for marijuana possession and a single count of possession of a controlled substance, cocaine, which Johnson had been caught holding for a friend during a traffic stop. (She believes a bench warrant is still active after her arrest for Mario’s assault kept her from appearing in court.) None of her drug charges, though, included possession with intent to sell.
Johnson acknowledges that she “was not raised the way that I chose to live my life in my twenties,” she said. In the years following the Great Recession, she’d found it hard to make ends meet. Eventually, in 2008, Johnson would be criminally charged with petty fraud and prostitution — the latter count thanks to an undercover vice officer who caught her.
Nonetheless, her cousin’s wife helped Johnson get what she characterized as an under-the-table job designing catalogs and handling invoicing and billing for a local company. However, Johnson was let go after about eight months, also owing to the recession. After moving to Long Beach in 2011, she earned a meager living doing hair.
That was partly what connected her to Mario Carr, whom she met in a McDonald’s near both their apartments. “The dynamics of our friendship were pretty much smoking weed together (if I bought it) and me braiding his hair once or twice,” Johnson said via email.
Aside from occasional phone calls, though, Johnson said, “For the most part Mario was usually asking for something from me [money, alcohol, and ecstasy pills] that I couldn’t provide.” He was moody and quiet, she recalls. “I wouldn’t even call it a friendship because we didn’t hang out much.”
These were details Johnson shared with Goodman and Lasch in her first interview with them four days after the shooting, on New Year’s Eve 2011. Initially, she says, she felt caught between two conflicting values — the desire to clear her name, and what she’d been taught growing up: not to get involved at all.
So, at first, with her sister present, Johnson denied knowing Carr or the circumstances of the shooting, even after being shown two old booking photos of Carr. She was alone that night, she told and then reiterated to Lasch and Goodman. She was getting in the shower when she heard what she thought were two or three firecrackers from outside her open shower window.
It was after detectives accused Johnson of lying, Goodman wrote, that her sister asked to leave. At that point, Johnson admitted she’d known Carr for four to five months. She’d last seen him three and a half weeks previously — when he told her he was going to be paid $100 per day to participate in a schizophrenia study — and had spoken to him on the phone about a week before Christmas.
Then, Carr told Johnson he wouldn’t be contacting her again “because he felt that he was always bothering her,” Goodman reported. Johnson says she had begun to distance herself from Carr because she was uncomfortable after learning from his sister that Carr was interested in harder drugs, especially crystal meth.
At this point, the two detectives told her they would continue the interview at the station. There, they wanted to know whether she had boyfriends, a husband, or any exes who regularly visited her.
Johnson offered the names of two male friends of hers. One, whom she knew as Idrissa Johnson (later identified as Idrissa “Bam” Simpson), sometimes helped her pay her rent and utility bills. Neither he nor the other man, she told the detectives, was jealous enough — or had any other reason — to want to shoot Carr, as Goodman reported asking Johnson.
Besides, Johnson told them, her relationship with Carr was not romantic. She admitted wanting to have sex with Mario; she enjoyed sex, she says, but Carr was only ever interested in smoking cannabis or obtaining “pills, alcohol, or money,” Goodman wrote.
Nor had either friend been with her the night of the shooting. Johnson vaguely remembers going out to the street that night to smoke a cigarette. By then, the rescue team was on scene, and several people had clustered in front of the apartment, trying to figure out what was going on.
She believes the man her apartment manager, Valdez, noticed her speaking to was a neighbor. Later, Valdez would testify that she remembered what Erica’s friend Simpson looked like, and the man Johnson had been speaking to didn’t have Simpson’s height or build.
Police reports include no record of detectives following up or attempting to follow up with either Simpson or Johnson’s other friend.
Had detectives asked her whether she knew Clanton, they might have learned that Johnson had met Clanton a couple of times while she visited the Carrs and Coates at their apartment. She’d even purchased cannabis from Clanton once or twice for personal use, she says. These transactions took place through Mario a month or two before the shooting. She didn’t know Clanton well, though, and doesn’t believe he knew where she lived.
Johnson gave the detectives two other leads. One was a white woman she’d seen in the alleyway, who she said had the appearance of a drug addict. She had seen the woman both alone and hanging around with Carr. The other lead was Carnisha Lambert. Carr, Johnson told the detectives, had told her his ex-girlfriend had been “stalking” him.
“Carr did not go into any other details but he seemed concerned about the matter,” Goodman wrote in his report. There is no record of police following up with either woman beyond their initial interview of Lambert with Jessica.
With Carr remaining comatose, witnesses and other evidence few and far between, and no weapon having been recovered from the scene, police curtailed their investigation. It was only when the victim awoke, six months later, that everything changed.
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