Beau Bayless was sitting outside Sushi Roku at Fashion Island on Tuesday, July 2, smoking a vape pen, when he heard a commotion near the Barnes & Noble.
“I didn’t think anything of it or even bother to look that direction until someone said, ‘Oh my God, that woman’s getting robbed’,” Bayless, 43, of Fountain Valley, said in a phone interview Saturday. “I saw her in the street fighting two gentlemen for her purse, so I tried to get over there to help her out.”
Bayless knew he had to intervene. “It could be someone’s grandma, could be someone’s mom,” he said. “She needed help.”
But, he mused, “I wasn’t quick enough.”
By the time he got there, three men had attacked and run over 68-year-old Patricia McKay, a New Zealand tourist, dragging her 65 feet under a car and killing her, authorities said. In the moments that followed, Bayless managed to tackle one of the suspects to the ground but was shot at by another. The trio fled in a white Toyota Camry, but Newport Beach police would arrest them hours later in Cypress and South Gate.
Bayless wishes he could have done more, but is hopeful the McKay family will see justice done.
“Anything that’s going to help that poor family,” Bayless said. “I feel so bad for all of them.”
Leroy Ernest Joseph McCrary, 26, Malachi Eddward Darnell, 18 and Jaden Cunningham, 18, were charged with special-circumstances murder with a sentencing enhancement for causing the death of someone older than 65, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announced Friday. They also face attempted robbery charges and other felonies. That the murder occurred in the commission of a robbery could make it a death-penalty case.
‘I saw the barrel’
McKay and her husband were outside the Barnes & Noble bookstore with their packages, waiting to be picked up, when the Camry approached and two masked men, identified by the DA’s office as Darnell and Cunningham, got out and fought with McKay’s 69-year-old husband,…
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