Man who strangled San Francisco girl to death in 2004 wins parole bid
Note: Readers may be interested in subsequent stories on this topic: ‘SF District Attorney backed killer’s parole bid over victim’s family objections‘ and ‘Governor reverses parole board decision to free killer of San Francisco girl‘.
The man who strangled to death a 17-year-old San Francisco girl in 2004 is heading for release after state authorities granted his application for parole after nearly two decades in prison.
A jury found Royce Miller guilty of the murder of Lincoln High School senior Maxina Danner. After the killing he wrapped his victim’s body in a blanket and discarded it on a roadside near a city park.
He was sentenced to the legally-mandated punishment for second degree murder: incarceration for a term of 15 years to life.
On October 12, 2023 the California Board of Parole Hearings approved Miller’s release. It had rejected an earlier parole bid in 2018 and barred him from reapplying for five years.
Unless Governor Gavin Newsom intervenes, Miller will walk out of San Quentin prison when the Board’s ‘decision review unit’ completes a mandatory check for legal or factual errors in its decision.
Newsom, who was San Francisco’s mayor at the time of Danner’s death – and visited her school to console her bereft classmates – has authority to modify or reverse parole decisions in murder cases.
Maxina, a popular senior at Lincoln High School, died in the early hours of September 27, 2004. She was killed by ligature strangulation, having also received multiple blunt force injuries to her face.
She told a friend she was planning to sneak out of her home after midnight on the 26th to meet Miller, apparently known to her as “Dashante,” with whom she had become somewhat familiar after first meeting a month earlier.
The court heard that Maxina was collected from her Corona Heights home by Miller, the pair then traveling to Miller’s house in a stolen car driven by his friend Maurice Powell – himself a violent ne’er-do-well previously accused of kidnapping and raping a woman at gunpoint. Within hours of leaving her home with 21-year-old Miller she was dead at his hands.
When Powell came back to Miller’s house at around 8:00pm he saw a girl’s body under a blanket in the garage. “I had to do what I had to do,” said Miller who then asked for Powell’s help with disposing of the body.
Powell declined, claiming his car wasn’t big enough, and left.
Another of Miller’s friends, Patrick Thomas did help him and the body was taken to McLaren Park and hurriedly dumped by the side of a road. At around midnight the body was spotted by a witness who reported it to San Francisco Police Department.
Responding officers found the body of a badly injured woman, clad in pyjamas, lying on the ground covered in a pink and blue quilt. She had clearly been strangled.
Cell phone records shown to the court indicated movement of both Maxina and Miller’s phones across San Francisco. Court records show that it appeared the last contact with Maxina on her phone was around 3:00am and that someone else was using her phone from around 4:00am onwards.
Miller’s mother testified that her son’s explanations about the situation had evolved: from first claiming he had only known the victim to later saying he had found a body and did not recognize who it was. He said he disposed of the body because, apparently, the police “always hassled him, and he figured it would not look good having a dead white girl in a black man’s house”.
Thomas was granted immunity by prosecutors in exchange for giving evidence against Miller.
Miller previously attended the San Francisco’s Galileo High School and, at the time of the killing, worked as a counsellor at a Haight-Ashbury group home ‘for court dependent adolescent foster girls’ run by his mother. His mother was visiting Los Angeles at the time her son murdered Maxina.
Miller was found guilty by a San Francisco jury in March 2007 and sentenced by judge Cynthia Ming-Mei Lee to 15 years to life imprisonment. The defense had argued that Thomas was the killer.
Miller’s conviction was affirmed by the California Court of Appeals in September 2010.
The case was prosecuted by Eric Fleming. Fleming was then an assistant district attorney but, since 2018, he has been a Superior Court Judge and now hears criminal cases at the city’s Hall of Justice.
Miller was granted parole by the California Board of Parole Hearings on October 12, 2023 with state records describing the decision as not “in person”. The Board denied a previous attempt by Miller to secure parole on October 24, 2018, for a period of five years and, on October 30, 2020 denied a request to bring forward his next parole hearing notwithstanding the five year denial.
He remains in San Quentin state prison awaiting a mandatory review of his parole decision by the Board’s ‘decision review unit’ – which checks all grants of parole for legal and factual accuracy.
After that check is complete, unless Governor Newsom exercises the authority he enjoys in cases of murder to modify or reverse parole decisions, Miller will be freed.
In 2022 Governor Newsom reversed decisions by the Board of Parole Hearings to parole murderers on 21 occasions. That year the Board held 4,445 hearings statewide, granting parole in 1,259 cases.
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