Less than 48 hours after San Francisco police announced they had arrested a suspect in a fatal Sunnydale shooting, the city’s District Attorney’s Office let him walk free. Gregory C. Morton, 32, was booked into San Francisco County Jail on suspicion of homicide, then released without charges after prosecutors said they could not disprove that he was acting in self-defense or in defense of others.
The reversal, first reported by Mission Local, came after San Francisco police spent nearly five months investigating the March 24 killing of 24-year-old Tertron Johnson, known to friends as Troop. Johnson was shot on the 1800 block of Sunnydale Avenue while attending a block party where friends were filming a rap music video, according to Mission Local. Officers responded to reports of gunfire at 10:43 p.m. and found Johnson suffering from gunshot wounds; paramedics rushed him to a hospital with life-threatening injuries, but he later died there, according to San Francisco News.
San Francisco’s Homicide Detail took the lead on the investigation, and authorities eventually identified Morton as the suspect and secured a warrant for his arrest, per San Francisco News. The San Francisco Police Department’s Violence Reduction Team located Morton on a premises in Oakland on August 8 and surveilled him there for four days before he crossed the Bay Bridge back into San Francisco, where officers took him into custody without incident, according to SFGATE. Police announced the arrest on August 13, and Morton was booked for homicide under Penal Code 187(a).
A Familiar Name in San Francisco Homicide Court
Morton’s arrest drew added scrutiny because it was not his first brush with a murder charge in the city. Court filings show that in March 2015, a then-21-year-old Gregory Charles Morton was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the drive-by shooting deaths of two teenagers at Crocker Amazon Park in the Ingleside District, the same account reports. He later entered a plea agreement in 2021 under then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin and was released after serving six years in pre-trial detention, per the outlet’s reporting…