Albert Greenwood Brown Jr. (born August 18, 1954) is an American murderer and rapist who has been convicted of sexual molestation with force of a minor, two counts of first-degree rape with force, and the first degree murder of a teen girl in Riverside, California.
He was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 9 p.m. on September 30, 2010, in California's first use of capital punishment since the lifting of a court-ordered moratorium. The use of lethal injection had been suspended in the state since February 2006 because of objections of cruel and unusual punishment for shortcomings of the facilities and procedures previously in use at San Quentin State Prison.
Brown's lawyers appealed to block their client's execution, with the execution initially planned to be carried out in a new facility at the prison that is certified to use either a single or three-drug protocol.
The US Ninth Court of Appeals ordered US District Judge Jeremy D. Fogel to review the case. It noted that the execution date might have been influenced by the fact that the prison's inventory of sodium thiopental, one of the drugs required for lethal injection, would expire on October 1, 2010. Judge Fogel halted the execution to permit time to review whether the new injection procedures addressed previous objections. On September 29, 2010, the Supreme Court of California unanimously denied an appeal by the state to proceed by the end of the month. Brown's execution was then delayed because the prison's supply of the lethal injection drug had expired. The manufacturer of sodium thiopental stated that new supplies would not be available until 2011.
As of 2019, Brown remains on death row as a result of the continuing state-wide suspension of the death penalty in California.
Early life
Brown grew up in Tulare, California, with his father's family that reportedly saw to it that "every kid went to college." According to a Tulare Western High School yearbook, he was to be part of the class of 1972. However, he was expelled from school after he accidentally fired a gun that he had brought on campus and grazed another student in the head on March 13. He joined the US Marine Corps, but was brought to court-martial and discharged in 1975 for being absent without leave.
Early criminal history
He moved to Riverside, California to live with his divorced mother and was soon charged with brutally raping and impregnating an 11-year-old girl. She said that Brown told her since he was a black man and she was a black girl; she was "in need of a feeding." She was forced to perform oral sex, and Brown then violently raped and choked her and sodomized her. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation.
On an early morning in 1976, Brown broke into a home in Riverside and hid in a closet until all of the residents had left. When a 14-year-old girl returned from a paper route to go to school, he choked her unconscious and brutally raped her in her mother's room. Brown pleaded guilty to charges of First Degree with Force on May 4, 1978, and was sentenced to state prison. He was paroled on June 14, 1980, and found work cleaning and preparing new cars for sale at Rubidoux Motors in Riverside County.
Death of Susan Louise Jordan
On the morning of October 28, 1980, Brown abducted 15-year-old Susan Louise Jordan while she was on her way to Arlington High School in Riverside. He had been posing as a jogger on the route. After dragging her to an orange grove, Brown brutally raped and sodomized her and strangled her to death with her shoelace; he also took her identification cards and school books. Susan's mother, Angelina Jordan, who had coincidentally left her car to be serviced at Brown's workplace, Rubidoux Motors, went to the school to search for Susan after her younger sister, Karen, and younger brother, James, returned home without her. After finding the family's number in a phone book, Brown called Angelina Jordan from a payphone at around 7:30 p.m. to tell her where he left her daughter's body. According to court documents, he said, "Hello, Mrs. Jordan, Susie isn't home from school yet, is she? You will never see your daughter again. You can find her body on the corner of Victoria and Gibson." Susan's body was found after Brown repeatedly made calls to the Riverside Police Department and the Jordan residence. One of Brown's subsequent calls was recorded by a police officer.