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“Did you ever meet with Dan Kavanaugh and the defendant with regard to the business?” Rodriquez asked.
Blake said she met twice with Merritt and Kavanaugh at Kavanaugh’s residence in San Diego to discuss efforts at preserving her son’s company. Merritt’s role was to build the fountains. Kavanaugh, whose expertise lay in the area of creating and maintaining a website to promote and sell the fountains, was to continue his efforts in that regard.
Blake described Kavanaugh as an “IT [information technology] guy. Dan was going to put something into my computer to keep the business going. Chase [i.e., Merritt] and I went down there together. We drove together the first time to San Diego, close to the downtown area.” She said Kavanaugh lived in an apartment in a highrise building and that the discussion extended to “how to keep the business together until we could find my son and his family. There was money needed. Chase needed money to complete the orders.”
Rodriguez asked, “At some point in the meeting did it get heated?”
“Just a little bit at that meeting,” Blake said. “They had had their words. He [Merritt] wanted money and Dan didn’t want to put out any money. He [Kavanaugh] said, “You’ve had enough. You were already given money to complete these jobs.’ It wasn’t yelling and screaming at that meeting.”
It was at a subsequent meeting that the relationship between Kavanaugh and Merritt broke into outright hostility, Blake said.
In the last of the two meetings, “They were definitely yelling and screaming, big time, at each other, arguing, and Dan just wasn’t going to budge,” she said. “There was a lot of cussing. Chase wanted to wring his neck. It didn’t feel right. It was very scary. I left. I walked out. I said, ‘If my son loses his business, so be it, I need to find my family’ and I left.”
Chase Merritt Trial In Horrific McStay Family Murder Case Begins | SBCSentinel