At about 6:45 p.m. on Friday, September 21, 2012, a man driving a Ford SUV pulled up in front of a home at 1936 Commerce Way, in Oakland, California. He got out, walked up the steps and pounded on the door. Inside, 13-year-old Shaka Fagans Jr. went to answer the door, but 34-year-old Lester Young, a family friend who was staying there, got there first.
When Young opened the door, a man shot him with a silver semi-automatic pistol. Fagans ran backward behind a couch as the shooter fired three more shots, fatally wounding Young as he was lying on the floor. Fagans fled out of the back door of the home and jumped over a fence.
Brian Duarte, a neighbor, was sitting in his car and saw the shooter arrive, heard the gunshots, and saw him leave. Duarte said the SUV had a California license plate “GNN941.”
Police determined that the vehicle was registered in the name of Richard Blockman, which they soon learned was an alias used by Erdis Powell, a man with a criminal record who lived in Vallejo, California.
Later that night, Oakland Police detective Phong Tran showed a photographic lineup to Fagans that included a photograph of Powell. The procedure was recorded. Tran told Fagans that there was a person of interest among the photographs, saying, “[T]here’s one person that we really think that may be involved somehow. We don’t know. It’s a feeling…there’s only one person we care about.”
Fagans eliminated four of the photographs and said that either of the remaining two photographs, one of which was Powell, could be the shooter. After the recording was turned off, Fagans said that photograph number 3, which was Powell, was the shooter. About 15 minutes later, Fagans was again shown the same photographic lineup and this time, he selected Powell as the shooter.
Duarte was then shown the same photographic lineup. He said the photograph of Powell resembled the shooter, but that he had a mole and the shooter did not. Despite Tran’s repeated urging, Duarte said he could not identify anyone as the shooter.
On September 25, 2012, an anonymous caller told the police that prior to the shooting, Young was having problems with 36-year-old Steven Buggs. Police learned that Buggs was on parole following a conviction for unpremeditated attempted murder. The police also located a red-light camera video that appeared to show Buggs driving the same Ford SUV on August 23, 2012, a month before the shooting.
On September 26, 2012, Tran showed another photographic lineup to Duarte that included five fillers and Buggs. Duarte identified Buggs as the shooter.
On September 30, 2012, police stopped the SUV in Oakland. Buggs was not in the vehicle, but his sister was. In the car, police found an insurance registration card showing that Buggs had paid to insure the vehicle for a two month period ending in July 2012. All the occupants were released. On October 2, 2012, a warrant for Buggs’s arrest was issued. He was taken into custody the following day as he left Young’s funeral. At the police station, Buggs expressed incredulity when Tran told him that Young’s family had implicated him as the shooter. He also declined to answer any questions relating to the shooting.
Tran continued the interrogation and at one point told Buggs that he would wind up in a courtroom with a jury of 12 white people who “only see a big scary black guy who [has] no heart.” Tran said that Buggs was going to “squeeze the noose a little tighter” unless he confessed to the crime. Buggs refused to talk to Tran about the case.
Ultimately, after about an hour, Tran ended the interrogation and Buggs was taken to the lockup.
On October 7, 2012, Fagans’s father, Shaka Fagans Sr., showed his son a photograph that showed Buggs with Young’s children. His son immediately said Buggs was the shooter. Sometime during the next three days, that photograph was given to Tran, who showed it to the younger Fagans. The youth confirmed that he believed Buggs was the shooter.
On October 10, 2012, Fagans Jr. viewed a live lineup and identified Buggs as the shooter. On October 15, 2012, Duarte viewed a video that had been recorded of that same lineup, and he also identified Buggs as the shooter.
In December 2013, at a preliminary hearing, Fagans said he identified Powell initially not because he believed Powell was the shooter, but because Fagans was afraid. He testified, as did Duarte, that Buggs was the shooter. At the conclusion of the preliminary hearing, Buggs was ordered to stand trial on a charge of first-degree murder.
Prior to trial, his defense attorney filed a motion to dismiss the case or impose sanctions on the prosecution because the recording of Duarte’s identification on September 26, 2012, was missing. The defense contended that the video would have shown the lineup was suggestive.
At a hearing on the motion, Tran testified that although he did not specifically recall having done so, his general practice would have been to record the lineup and download the recording to a disc. When he was notified the disc was missing, Tran said he attempted to recover the original recording from the computer server where it should have been stored, but the server had reached maximum storage capacity, and it was not possible to obtain a copy.
The defense motion was denied. The judge ruled that the defense had failed to show that the missing evidence was material or that the prosecution had acted in bad faith.
A defense motion to exclude Fagans’s identification of Buggs, as the product of a suggestive lineup, also was denied.
In January 2015, Buggs went to trial in Alameda County Superior Court. Buggs’s defense attorney, Mark McGoldrick, contended that Buggs was a victim of mistaken witness identification. He told the jury in his opening statement that Young and Buggs were friends who spent time together, drank together, and looked for work together. At the time of the crime, Buggs had been released on parole six months earlier for a second-degree murder conviction.
Shaka Fagans Jr. was the prosecution’s first witness. He identified Buggs as the shooter. He said he intentionally identified Powell as the shooter because he did not want to get involved and wanted time to figure out what to do. He said that after his father showed him the photograph of Buggs with Young’s children, he knew that Buggs was the shooter.
Duarte testified and identified Buggs as the shooter.
The prosecution presented cell phone evidence suggesting that Buggs’s cell phone was near the scene of the shooting at the time of the crime. The cell phone expert, Shawn Knight, an investigator for the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, told the jury he had analyzed cell phone tower data to say that Buggs’s cell phone and Young’s cell phones were traveling together prior to the shooting and that both were turned off shortly before the shooting when the phones were near the scene of the crime.
Knight said he believed that Buggs and Young were traveling together based on his analysis. Asked by the defense if it was possible that they were traveling independently and that the timing was coincidental, Knight said, “Yes, it could be possible.”
“But there’s no way to know for sure, correct, due to the inexact nature of cell tower data?” the defense asked.
“I would say there is no way to be exact, yes, sir,” Knight replied.
Crystal Hendrix testified that she and Buggs had a child together prior to his conviction and incarceration. She said that in the six months after he was released, they had spent time together and were trying to decide if they could rekindle their relationship. In the meantime, they were going to family gatherings and spending time together.
Hendrix also testified that she had been a friend of Young’s for more than 20 years. She testified that Tran hounded and threatened her in an attempt to say that Buggs killed Young because he was jealous of Young’s friendship with Hendrix.
She testified that about a month before the murder, she went fishing one night with both of them, although she was the one who was fishing. She said Young and Buggs were drinking and that Young became very intoxicated. She said she was about 20 feet away from them when they began fighting in the dark. Young was knocked down and injured his nose. The prosecution suggested that they were fighting over Hendrix.
Hendrix said Buggs and Young were friends, and that was the only time they had ever engaged in any physical violence against each other. She said that Buggs drove Young to the hospital to get bandaged up and that they were back to being friends the following day.
The defense presented Dr. Kathy Pezdek, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University who was an expert in eyewitness memory and identification. Dr. Pezdek identified numerous factors, including weapon focus, the limited time of viewing the crime, and Tran’s telling the witnesses that the suspect was in the lineup, which Dr. Pezdek said undercut the reliability of the identifications of Buggs.
On February 9, 2015, the jury convicted Buggs of first-degree murder committed with a firearm. He was sentenced to 82 years to life in prison.
The conviction was upheld in 2017 by the First District California Court of Appeal.
In 2021, attorneys for Cartier Hunter and Giovante Douglas, who had been convicted of murder based on an eyewitness identification obtained by Detective Tran, sought a new trial based on evidence that a witness had recanted her trial testimony. The witness said that Tran had paid her as much as $30,000 for testifying and failed to disclose the payments to the defense lawyers for Hunter and Douglas.
The Alameda County District Attorney's office began re-investigating the case and on September 13, 2022, the prosecution agreed to the vacating of Hunter’s and Douglas's convictions. The charges were dismissed, and both men were released.
In April 2023, Tran was charged with two counts of perjury for giving false testimony at the trial of Hunter and Douglas. Tran also was charged with subornation of perjury and bribery of a witness. Tran also was charged with attempted bribery of the witness in the Hunter and Douglas case.
At the same time, the District Attorney’s office said it intended to review at least 125 cases that Tran investigated.
In the fall of 2025, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Thomas Stevens ordered an evidentiary hearing on a petition filed on behalf of Buggs. The petition claimed that Tran’s investigation, as evidenced by his comments during the interrogation of Buggs, was guided by stereotypes of Black men, in violation of the Racial Justice Act of California. The Act was passed in 2020 to allow defendants to challenge their convictions based on racial animus.
In December 2025, Judge Stevens vacated Buggs’s conviction and ordered a new trial. The judge said that the amount of misconduct by Tran in other cases, including the case of Hunter and Douglas, required a new trial. The judge said that had the jury been aware of Tran’s misconduct, it was more likely than not that at least one juror would have voted to acquit Buggs.
Stevens also cited allegations that Tran had paid off witnesses in two other cases so they would adopt statements that he fed to them.
“In a case where the jurors were concerned about the accuracy of the identifications and the integrity of Tran’s methods, evidence that Tran had allegedly engaged in misconduct in other investigations would likely have carried weight,” Stevens ruled.
On January 22, 2026, the prosecution dismissed the case, and Buggs was released. He was awarded $680,400 from the California Victim Compensation Board in 2026.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 02-12-2026
Last Update Date: 08-10-2026
