Found Deceased CA - Zachary Kennedy, 31, Long Beach, 22 Oct 2017 *Arrest*

[kelsie]

Article is behind a paywall so I’m not sure what it says. I couldn’t find any other articles with any information. For second time, murder charge is tossed in Long Beach case involving Zach Kennedy

The death of Zachary Kennedy, who went missing for more than six months before his body was found buried in the side yard of a Long Beach home, was not the result of a homicide, a judge ruled Wednesday, Dec. 8.

For the second time, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge dismissed a murder charge against Scott David Leo. This time, Judge James D. Otto also dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge and said prosecutors had not provided enough evidence that showed Leo was responsible for Kennedy’s death.

Leo, 55, was held to answer on three drug-related charges: maintaining a place for selling or using controlled substances and two counts of sale, transportation or offer to sell a controlled substance.

Kennedy, 31, was last seen at Leo’s house, in the 500 block of East Eighth Street, on Oct. 22, 2017 after attending a party, his father, Jeff Kennedy has said.

Police, along with friends and family, searched for him for more than six months before police found his body in the side yard of Leo’s home after serving a search warrant.

Kennedy had been placed in a bin, which was buried upside down, and his feet had been severed, Scott Lasch, who has since retired as a detective with the Long Beach Police Department, testified Wednesday.

Leo and Kennedy had used methamphetamine and GHB, also known as the date rape drug, the night Kennedy was last seen, according to testimony at the preliminary hearing that started last week and wrapped up Wednesday.

Leo’s attorney, Matthew Kaestner, argued that Kennedy likely overdosed on narcotics – methamphetamine and GHB – that Kennedy was providing, citing testimony from a witness who said Kennedy brought drugs to Leo’s house on another visit two weeks prior to his death.

He argued during the preliminary hearing that prosecutors had not provided any evidence that Leo supplied or injected Kennedy with the drugs that caused his death.

Prosecutor Simone Shay had argued that Leo knew Kennedy was dying and was obligated to get him help, pointing to text messages Leo had sent to a friend that included photos of Kennedy in Leo’s bathtub suffering from the effects of an overdose. The messages included details that Kennedy had blue lips, was bleeding from the mouth and had a low pulse, according to testimony.

She also argued that Leo didn’t report the overdose to authorities because he didn’t want the police to come to his home. Leo went to a Home Depot the next day and rented an auger and tamper, tools used to dig the hole in the side yard, according to testimony.

Kaestner said Leo failed to report a dead body and desecrated a body, charges that were not alleged by prosecutors in the case.

Otto, the judge, referred to the facts of the case as “despicable” and “jolting,” but said the evidence showed that the drugs were voluntarily consumed and that Kennedy had consumed both methamphetamine and GHB numerous times prior to the night he died.

Leo and Kennedy were acquaintances, Jeff Kennedy has said. Zach Kennedy was from Pennsylvania, but left for Long Beach, where he did odd jobs and found a tight-knit group of friends, about 10 years before he died.

Leo was arrested by Long Beach police more than two years after Kennedy’s body was found. In January, a judge dismissed the murder charge, but held Leo to answer on charges of involuntary manslaughter and the three drug charges.

In November, prosecutors dismissed the previous case and filed a new one because a witness wasn’t available for the previous preliminary hearing. In doing so, prosecutors re-introduced the murder charge, but once again, it was tossed.

Shay declined comment following the hearing.

 

[Countem]

Defendant buried man’s body so he could keep hosting drug-fueled parties, prosecutor says • Long Beach Post News

After burying an overdose victim in his yard, Scott Leo continued to invite other men over for sex, meth and GHB, prosecutors said as a long-awaited trial began today.

lbpost.com

Almost four years after a man’s body was unearthed in his yard, 55-year-old Scott Leo sat before a jury Wednesday while lawyers began crafting competing pictures of him as a drug-peddling predator and an upstanding citizen who only occasionally hosted narcotics-fueled sex parties.

Leo has become the central figure in the death of 31-year-old Zach Kennedy, who disappeared on Oct. 22, 2017, about a decade after he moved to Long Beach from his small-town home in Pennsylvania.

Kennedy was one of the men who attended parties at Leo’s Downtown home, where witnesses say meth and the sedative GHB were freely passed around.

That night, Kennedy passed out from a likely overdose, and, fearing attention from police, Leo let Kennedy die in his bathtub instead of calling for help, authorities allege.

In the years of hearings leading up to this week’s trial, Leo’s attorney, Matthew Kaestner, has essentially admitted this, but he’s successfully argued it was not homicide, pointing out that Leo did not have the same duty to care for his guest as a parent would for a child or a doctor would for a patient.

Judges have repeatedly thrown out murder and manslaughter charges against Leo, so the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office is left prosecuting him for allegedly furnishing meth, furnishing GHB and maintaining his home as a place to use drugs.

“This is a place where he has used it and made it so he can continuously invite people over to engage in the use of illegal narcotics,” Deputy District Attorney Simone Shay told jurors in her opening statement Wednesday morning.

The charges against Leo could net him about six years in prison as opposed to the 15-to-life sentence a murder conviction would have. He’s currently free on $100,000 bail.

As she introduced her case, Shay said she plans to present text messages and communications from dating apps to show Leo used drugs, which he called “party faves,” to repeatedly lure men to his home. In her opening pitch to jurors, she sought to separate the illegal drug use from the sexual activity.

“We are not here to pass judgment on the lifestyle,” she said—but explained that the private, sometimes explicit, communications will shed light on his priorities.

For instance, when Kennedy appeared to be overdosing on GHB on Oct. 22, 2017, Leo texted a friend asking for help moving him, saying the last thing he needed was another visit from the police, who’d lectured him and other party guests about drug use about two weeks earlier when someone falsely reported a crime at his home, prompting officers to arrive and pull Leo, naked, out of the basement.

This time, police did not arrive. Detectives say Leo instead sent his friend a picture of Kennedy slumped forward in the tub, face pressed against the porcelain, his eyes partially open.

When Shay put the photo on an overhead projector, Kennedy’s father, watching from the audience, turned his head away; when the photo lingered, he walked out—momentarily escaping the courtroom where his son’s drug use and sexual history have been parsed out in excruciating detail.

Defense attorney Kaestner highlighted Kennedy’s drug use again and again as he began making his case to jurors. He called Kennedy a daily meth user, shooting up so frequently he could no longer find veins in his arms—a description the prosecutor repeatedly objected to and the judge ruled out of bounds.

By contrast, Kaestner said, Leo had a steady job in client development at a white-shoe law firm. He owned his well-kept house in Long Beach not to do drugs but because, “It was his home, where he lived.”

At the time of Kennedy’s death, Leo “had a well-respected position,” but, “As a gay man, he liked to have sex with other gay men, and from time to time do drugs,” Kaestner said.

Isn’t it more likely, he asked, that Kennedy supplied the drugs he used at Leo’s?

“What the government is trying to do,” Kaestner said, “is find that person to blame, to point that finger of blame in a tragic overdose death.” In this case, Kaestner admitted, it’s tempting to pick Leo for that role.

After Kennedy died and his friends came looking for him, Leo lied, saying Kennedy had walked away from his home. But after a months-long search, detectives unearthed his body in Leo’s backyard. It had been wrapped in a shower curtain and bag before being buried in a plastic tub. Presumably, to fit the body into the container, Kennedy’s feet had been severed at his ankles and wrapped separately.

Kaestner urged the jury not to let the horror of that discovery cloud their judgment. He accused prosecutors of being “long on the talk about Zach overdosing and being buried in Leo’s yard and very short on evidence that Mr. Leo gave Zach the drugs that caused his death.”

But Leo’s callousness in response to Kennedy’s death may be an integral part of the prosecution’s case. Even after hiding a body in his yard, Shay told jurors, Leo was more interested in continuing his drug use than learning from the overdose.

In February 2018, as Kennedy’s body lay underground, Leo was messaging another man, offering him meth and GHB if he’d come over for a party.

“What we see,” she said, “is this defendant has a plan for his home.”

 

[Countem]

Man who buried missing overdose victim in yard convicted on drug charges • Long Beach Post News

Zach Kennedy was one of the younger, drug-addicted men Scott Leo preyed on by offering meth and GHB so he could use them for sex “down in the dungeon that he created,” the prosecutor said.

lbpost.com

The man who mutilated and buried the body of a 31-year-old houseguest in 2017 was convicted Tuesday on drug charges, marking the conclusion of a criminal case that’s spent years winding through the justice system as lawyers argued whether the defendant could face murder charges.

There was no debate that Scott Leo, 55, had let Zach Kennedy die in his bathtub, most likely after an overdose on the sedative and party drug GHB. But during a six-day trial, jurors heard about this only to bolster the prosecutor’s case that Leo knew he was guilty of providing the drugs and desperate to cover it up so he could continue using his home near Downtown Long Beach as a venue for narcotics-fueled sex parties.

Leo preyed on drug-addicted younger men, luring them to his home with the promise of meth and GHB so he could use them for sex “down in the dungeon that he created,” Deputy District Attorney Simone Shay said, referencing the sparse basement at Leo’s home where police found sexual apparatuses and drugs.

“He’s willing to do whatever it takes to make sure nothing is going to stop the party going on at his house,” Shay said Monday in her closing argument to jurors. In Kennedy’s case, she said, that meant severing his feet, presumably so Leo could fit Kennedy’s body into a plastic bin that was buried in the yard.

“Nothing explains what he did other than he knew he had provided those narcotics and he had to cover it up,” Shay said.

When Kennedy went missing in October 2017, suspicion immediately turned to Leo because friends knew Kennedy had been invited over before disappearing. Leo insisted that Kennedy left the home without any problems, but after multiple searches, police discovered the body.

Shay said a fresh mound of dirt tipped off detectives after they compared the home’s current state to recent real estate–listing photos, and when they searched the phone of one of Leo’s friends, they found messages talking about Kennedy with blue lips and a weak pulse, apparently overdosing.

Leo sent the friend pictures of Kennedy slumped forward in a tub and asked for help moving him, but Leo later insisted Kennedy had popped back up and been no worse for wear. Six months later, police uncovered the body after an extensive investigation and awareness campaign by Kennedy’s family and friends.

Leo’s conviction was the final battle fought in memory of Zach, said his father, Jeff Kennedy, who’s flown cross-country to be at nearly every crucial court hearing.

“I think Scott Leo’s a predator,” Jeff said. “ … It was so calculated what he did, so planned, what he did. He knew what he was doing.”

Jurors convicted Leo on all three criminal counts he was facing: furnishing GHB, furnishing meth and maintaining a drug house—all felonies. Before trial, defense attorney Matthew Kaestner had successfully argued Leo couldn’t be charged with Zach’s death because he did not have a legal duty to care for the dying man like a parent of a child or doctor watching over a patient would.

As he tried on Monday to undermine the prosecutor’s case, Kaestner urged jurors not to be distracted by the horror of what Leo had done.

“We know his worst behavior, but it’s not charged in this case,” he said.

He accused prosecutors of using shaky facts to try to present a pattern of behavior—relying on messages between Leo and his potential dates combined with an eyewitness account of only two drug-parties to assert this was a regular occurrence at Leo’s home.

“There’s been a lot of smoke in this case. And sometimes the smoke gets so thick you can’t see,” Kaestner said. He described Leo as an upstanding citizen with a job in client development at a prestigious law firm who hid Zach’s body in order to protect his career.

Leo’s occasional parties didn’t turn his well-kept home on Eighth Street into a drug house any more than someone inviting friends over for beers would turn their apartment into a bar, Kaestner argued.

He also pointed out police weren’t able to test the drugs they alleged Leo provided or offered to provide on four specific dates in 2017 and 2018. Instead, they relied on witnesses’ perceptions and partial records of Leo’s messages recovered from an online backup. Detectives never found Zach’s phone and were never able to break into Leo’s to get a full accounting, according to Shay.

Kaestner said this incomplete evidence amounted to the government relying on innuendo and what he called the “troll” argument: essentially implying Leo was so old and ugly that he had to use drugs to convince men to have sex with him.

“They’re trying to give you one side of the story,” he told jurors in his final plea for acquittal.

In the end, the jurors were not swayed, deliberating for about an hour Monday afternoon and most of the day Tuesday before returning guilty verdicts on all counts.

Bailiffs took Leo into custody immediately after the verdict was read. He’ll remain jailed without bail until his sentencing on March 30 where he’ll face a maximum of between six and seven years behind bars.