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On April 28, 2000, 20-year-old inmate Michael Dwayne Wallace was mopping the hallway of a work furlough facility on Middlefield Road when a single bullet crashed through the glass window and struck him in the chest, killing him. More than 20 years later, police say they have found and arrested a suspect in the case.
In a statement Thursday, Mountain View police announced they arrested Stockton resident Charles Morris, 70, on homicide charges after compiling enough new evidence that he fired into the facility that evening and likely missed his intended target, striking Wallace instead.
Morris is being held without bail in Santa Clara County Main Jail.
Wallace was serving a jail sentence for a minor drug offense the year prior, and was scheduled to be released in less than a week when he was killed. In lieu of doing time in county jail, inmates convicted of non-violent charges had the option to work during the day and sleep at a work furlough facility that was located at 590 E. Middlefield Road. The property has since been razed and replaced with tech offices.
Wallace was reportedly on clean-up duty the night of the slaying, and was chatting with another inmate when he was shot. He was taken to Stanford Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. Two staffers at the facility also suffered injuries from the shattered glass.
The investigation at the time led police to Morris, another furlough worker who had butted heads with someone else working at the facility. Witnesses at the time said Morris got into a heated argument that bordered on a physical confrontation, and that the person he was upset with looked like one of the staffers standing in the hallway near Wallace. But officers concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest him.
“While a thorough investigation was done at the time, detectives were unable to develop sufficient evidence to move forward with the investigation,” police said in the statement Thursday.
Investigators sought to reexamine the case starting in 2019, and poured thousands of hours into re-interviewing witnesses and reviewing evidence and crime scene details. The extra evidence was enough for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office to file homicide charges, and Mountain View police arrested Morris at his home in Stockton. He was scheduled to be arraigned on the charges on Thursday, Aug. 19.
Wallace’s family members worried in the months following the murder that, while police took the case seriously, the public and local media didn’t seem all that interested in what happened. They said Wallace had recently moved to the area and had no enemies, and that he likely wasn’t the intended target.
This is the second decades-old murder case solved by the Mountain View Police Department this year. In February, investigators used DNA evidence to determine the identity of a man who had stabbed and killed Milpitas resident Darryl O’Donnell in 1990. The suspect, Sunnyvale resident John Snowgrass, had died in 2006.
Good work, MVPD!