ANTIOCH — An Oakland man has been sentenced to life in prison for killing a girl in Antioch, just days after he allegedly sexually abused her and subsequently accused her of being untrustworthy, court records show.
Michael Fritz Jr., 22, accepted a second degree murder conviction and a prison sentence of 15 years to life, just days before his trial was about to start last year, court records show. He pleaded no contest to killing 12-year-old K’Lea Davis, who was shot in the head inside an apartment on the 1200 block of Oak Haven Way in Antioch, on May 11, 2021.
Fritz was transferred to prison in mid-November, and is being housed at the Substance Treatment Facility in Corcoran, records show.
Had Fritz’s case gone to trial, prosecutors would have presented a shocking narrative to the jury. A pretrial motion by Deputy District Attorney Mary Knox says that Fritz had previously threatened to “beat the (expletive)” out of K’Lea and made menacing comments like, “it’s on,” two days before the shooting.
Fritz had a 16-year-old “girlfriend” at the time, yet six days before K’Lea’s murder, she and Fritz “had sexual intercourse,” the prosecution motion says. The two later quarreled in texts, with K’Lea telling Fritz, “I hate u (sic)” and Fritz responding, “good I actually don’t care.”
Approximately three months before K’Lea was murdered, a firefighter saw Fritz assault the 16-year-old girl and throw a large piece of asphalt at her, according to court filings.
Before the plea deal was struck, Fritz’s lawyer filed a motion to allow jurors to hear racist communications by Antioch police officers named in a widely-circulated District Attorney report. Several of the participants in text groups where racist, homophobic, and sexist comments were exchanged were on the prosecution’s witness list, according to the defense. Prosecutors responded by arguing that messages from officers’ “personal cellphones” should be excluded, records show.
Fritz faced up to 50 years to life in prison when he was originally charged.
Just six weeks after K’Lea was killed, her brother, 17-year-old Kweli Davis, was killed at San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood in a shooting that also injured a woman in her 30s, authorities said. The case remains unsolved.
An online fundraiser for K’Lea, from 2021, says that her friends and family are “devastated and taken back by the tragic ordeal.”
“(K’Lea) was wise. She was loving. Nurturing. She was a leader. She was ambitious and had a mind all of her own,” the fundraiser page says. “She loved spending time with her friends. She did hair and liked to dance.”