Man Serving Sentence Slain in Home Where Father Was Killed

By SOLOMON MOORE

Jan. 7, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LANCASTER — A man serving out a jail sentence at home was discovered shot to death Monday night, a year and three months after his father was gunned down outside the house, said a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman.

Michael Anthony Stitt, 20, was found sitting on his couch with gunshot wounds to his head and chest, according to his mother, Eve Beaudoin. Sheriff’s deputies said they suspect Stitt was shot just before midnight Sunday after an argument that was heard by neighbors.

A friend of Stitt’s discovered the body at 8 p.m. the next day, deputies said. Eve Beaudoin, who also lives at the house, said she was in Los Angeles for the weekend.

Sheriff’s deputies said there was no sign of forced entry but would not release any other details about the slaying.

Next-door neighbor Cathy Eggerth said three gunshots woke up her and her husband Sunday night, but they did not call authorities.

“That’s the bad part,” Eggerth said. “Normally we would call but [the gunfire] sounded far away and we wouldn’t even know where to tell them to go.”

Stitt had been in trouble with the law on several occasions. Three months ago he was released from jail and sent home under the county’s electronic-monitoring program. He had been convicted of felony false personation and was due to be released in May, deputies said.

Family members said Stitt had also been arrested in the past for grand theft auto. After his death, deputies confiscated his car because they suspected it contained stolen parts, Beaudoin said.

This marks the second time Beaudoin, 52, has lost a loved one to violence at the tract home on the 2600 block of East Avenue J-10.

Her husband, James Beaudoin, was slain in October 1996 outside the home by a man trying to set fire to Michael Stitt’s car, investigators said at the time of the killing. Eve Beaudoin said she stumbled out of the door to see her husband, then 49, lying face-down with bullet wounds in his head and chest.

Sheriff’s officials said that case is still unsolved, but Eve Beaudoin believes the assailants who killed her husband were after her son.

“It was a case of mistaken identity,” she said, crying, on Monday. “They thought he was my baby.”

James Beaudoin was Stitt’s biological father, Eve Beaudoin said. Her son took the name Stitt, she said, to avoid being arrested on a past warrant.

The Lancaster house, which looks out on a craggy field of parched brush, is still marred by a patched bullet hole, a remnant of James Beaudoin’s killing. When the family moved to the Antelope Valley in 1994, they expected it to be a refuge from the violence that often flares in South Los Angeles, their previous home, Eve Beaudoin said. But even after James landed a job at McDonnell Douglas Corp., their life remained unsettled.

“My husband wanted to move to a safer, quieter place for the kids,” she cried, clinging to a pair of her son’s bedroom slippers. “Now he’s gone and my son’s gone.”

Eve Beaudoin said she will most likely move back to her old home in South-Central.

“The memory of my husband and my Mikey will drive me crazy if I stay here.”