Suspect arrested and charged with murder in 2020 Oakland homicide
OAKLAND — A 38-year-old man has been arrested and charged with murder in the August 2020 killing of a father of five who was shot near a Lakeshore Avenue bus stop.
Ronald McGregor was arrested June 27 in San Francisco in connection with the killing of 55-year-old Darius Brazell. He has pleaded not guilty and remains in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin on a no-bail hold, records show.
McGregor was identified as a suspect by DNA found on clothing at the shooting scene, as well as nearby surveillance camera video footage, police said in court records. They haven’t released a suspected motive for the killing.
Brazell was shot and killed around 6 p.m. near an AC Transit stop at Lakeshore Avenue and Mandana Boulevard. Police pledged at the time they would arrest a suspect.
Family members told the news station KTVU that Brazell was planning to move to Merced from West Oakland before he was killed.
“He’s always just been a good person. He was never a person who hated nobody,” Darian Brazell, Darius Brazell’s son, told KTVU.
McGregor has a lengthy criminal history that includes multiple gun possession convictions.
In 2013, he was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for possessing a stolen pistol in the Hunters Point/Bayview area of San Francisco, but an appeals court overturned that sentence after finding a prior rape conviction didn’t count as a violent predicate under federal law. He was re-sentenced to six years and eight months, released to a halfway house in 2017, and given an additional three months in jail for absconding from the halfway house in 2018, court records show.