GHS senior reiterates not guilty plea, decides to get public
defender before pre-trial conference
Superior Court Judge Hector Ramon delayed the pre-trial conference of Gilroy High School senior Marshad Johnson Thursday to give the 18-year-old a chance to visit with a public defender.
At his Feb. 26 arraignment, Johnson initially elected to represent himself and pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of possessing burglary tools. He will return to Department 92 of the South County Courthouse in San Martin April 3 at 9 a.m.
Johnson, 18, was the only adult among five football players cited last December by the Gilroy Police Department for planning and partaking in the theft of about $1,700 worth of electronics, cash, shoes and clothes from the GHS soccer team’s lockers during school hours. The collective act constitutes grand theft, according to Johnson’s case file.
At his brief appearance Thursday, Johnson said he will stick with his not guilty plea and discuss his options with a public defender. If Johnson changes his plea to guilty, he said he would have to pay a fine, do some community service and stay out of trouble for one year, which wouldn’t be a problem for Johnson, according to his father, Tony Johnson.
“He’s a good kid who made a bad decision,” Tony Johnson said as his son stood beside him in a black button-down shirt, black slacks and shiny black shoes. “With everything he’s done in assisting the police, and the principal going to bat for him. He’s a good student.”
Johnson, who showed up to court with a file of letters vouching for his character, admitted to having burglary tools at the time of the incident, but he said he never used them to pick a lock and he never opened a locker or took anything. The police report reads differently, though, claiming Johnson admitted to fashioning the tools, looking inside lockers and picking locks. The report, written by School Resource Officer Cherie Somavia, also says one of the four juveniles arrested received a personal video game console from Johnson soon after a coach caught the football player in the locker room.
However, Somavia’s wrote in her report that she “was never able to determine who actually stole items out of the lockers.”
Somavia’s report reads that the coach discovered Johnson fiddling with a soccer locker Dec. 5, using an aluminum “shiv” to pry open a lock – a burglary technique discovered on YouTube.com by another football player. The four other juveniles in the locker room with Johnson ran away when he was caught; they subsequently exchanged, sold and returned the stolen goods at various times with other players, according to Somavia’s report.
Three of the juveniles are charged with possession of burglary tools and one is charged with knowingly receiving stolen property, a felony.
