Yolo crime victims call for their voices to be heard in launch of new coalition
A new Yolo County-based crime victims coalition launched Friday in Woodland just days before Daniel William Marsh, the man responsible for one of that county’s most gruesome crimes, appears before a state appellate court next week in a bid for his freedom.
The group Hear Us Yolo brings together Yolo County crime victims, Yolo County District Attorney’s victim services and the statewide organization Crime Victims United to provide support for victims of violent crime and advocate for violent crime survivors and their families before state lawmakers in Sacramento.
“This coalition will ensure the voice of the victim is heard, that the rights of the victim are upheld and that we bring back balance in the legislature,” said Nina Salerno, president of Crime Victims United, at the Friday morning news conference at Yolo County District Attorney’s Office in Woodland announcing the advocacy group’s launch. “Hear Us Yolo will speak for those who want to make sure that crime victims are a part of every law” in California.
The group wants to “make sure the voices of victims are heard loudly and clearly,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig said Friday. “It seemed victims’ voices and rights haven’t been heard or considered.” Crime victims, he said, “continue to be victimized by the system that was supposed to protect them.”
Hanging over the Friday announcement, the mutilation murders of 87-year-old Oliver “Chip” Northup and wife, 76-year-old Claudia Maupin, in the bedroom of their Davis condominium by a then 15-year-old Daniel Marsh in April 2013, days before his 16th birthday; and the upcoming Aug. 18 appellate hearing that could set the imprisoned Marsh free.
Maupin’s eldest daughter, Victoria Hurd, and granddaughter Sarah Rice sat with other family members and Yolo crime victims in the front row of the small Yolo County District Attorney’s meeting room for the announcement.
The two have become powerful voices for crime victims in the eight years since Northup and Maupin were slain. Rice recently piloted a social media campaign urging state lawmakers to scrap the 2019 senate bill that Marsh is now arguing should set him free.
Marsh — now 24 and serving a sentence of 52 years to life in a San Diego prison for the slayings — is looking to Senate Bill 1391, the 2019 law that bars 14- and 15-year-olds accused of violent crimes from being tried as adults.
Marsh is appealing his 2014 Yolo Superior Court conviction asking state appeals judges to retroactively reconsider the case to decide whether his murder case was final when the 2019 law passed.
If the appellate judges rule in Marsh’s favor, he could be released from prison in May 2022 on his 25th birthday, the sentence Marsh would have received had he been tried as a juvenile in the killings.
An agonizing five-week murder trial in 2014, during which jurors and the victims’ families heard Marsh’s videotaped confession to investigators, laid bare the savagery of the murders. It also revealed Marsh’s disturbing fascination with killing made real when he wandered a Davis neighborhood carrying a hunting knife and made his way into Northup and Maupin’s bedroom.
So graphic was the testimony at trial that “(police) officers had to go into therapy; the jury members who passed around the (crime) photos so we didn’t have to see them, they had to go to therapy,” Rice said.
A 2018 juvenile hearing mandated under the state’s newly passed Proposition 57 to determine whether Marsh should be tried again as a juvenile or whether the case stay in adult criminal court, reignited agony for Maupin and Northup’s families. A Yolo judge ultimately upheld Marsh’s sentence.
Now, as Marsh prepares to return again to a Sacramento courtroom, Hurd and Rice at the Friday news conference called again for lawmakers to change SB 1391 to consider crimes like the one that befell their family.
“Every two years, the victims — it falls on us, the victims, to keep a psychopath in jail,” Rice said. “Marsh could be out in May 2022. The state of California needs to follow the lead of Yolo County. My family is exhausted. Help us carry the burden.”
This story was originally published August 13, 2021 at 2:50 PM.
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