OAKLAND — The murder trial of two Vallejo brothers ended this month with a split verdict, where one was found not guilty and the other was convicted and all but certainly faces a life sentence.
Louis Arbee, 27, was convicted Sept. 1 of murdering Tyon Bratcher, while Arbee’s brother, 25-year-old Danquay Johnson, was acquitted of murder, manslaughter and shooting at an occupied vehicle. Jurors convicted Johnson of accessory after the fact and evading police.
Bratcher was shot and killed around 5:15 p.m. March 16, 2021, in the 19800 block of San Miguel Avenue in Castro Valley, as he sat in the backseat of a car with Arbee’s girlfriend, whose finger was partially shot off.
During trial, it was revealed that Bratcher fired at Arbee first. But prosecutors painted Arbee as a scorned lover who approached the vehicle carrying an “uzi-style” firearm and that it was Bratcher who fired in self-defense.
Johnson was not a suspected shooter and was simply in the car with his brother when the situation unfolded, his attorney, Linda Fullerton, argued at trial. She said Arbee and Johnson simply wanted to return the girlfriend’s belongings and had no idea who Bratcher was.
“We are grateful that the jurors recognized that Mr. Johnson was innocent. However, we are saddened by the guilty verdict for his brother, Mr. Arbee, as we believe that he, too, is not guilty,” Fullerton said in an email to this newspaper.
After the shooting, police say Arbee and Danquay led authorities on an hours-long police chase that ended with them ditching their vehicle in Oakland’s Rockridge District, near the College Avenue exit of Highway 24. They were arrested months after the shooting, in October 2021, at a Vallejo residence on Corcoran Avenue.
During trial, Danquay’s attorneys argued that there was a legitimate reason that Arbee was armed that day, and called upon the popular poet and actor Donté Clark, a North Richmond native, to testify as an expert about “the high rate of gun violence in African-American communities has resulted in a state of hypersensitivity” and the “systemic trauma” that has led to a “generational loop of violence” that led to many in the community carrying weapons for “defensive purposes,” according to court records.
