From the February 3, 2004 LAPD news release:
On January 29, 2003, at about 1:30 p.m., an off-duty Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy was fired at by a gunman at a condominium complex located in the 9900 block of Topanga Boulevard in Chatsworth. The Deputy was unharmed by the gunfire and the gunman ran away. Christopher Walsh, an associate of the suspected gunman, lived at the complex and witnessed the unprovoked attack. He was detained for questioning and released.
Following an extensive investigation by members of the Devonshire Homicide Unit, the gunman was identified as David Michael Steinberg. Arrest warrants charging Steinberg with assault and Walsh for accessory were issued on June 24, 2003. In the course of attempting to locate and arrest these suspects, the investigators became aware that Walsh had been reported as a missing person by family members on June 30, 2003. On the same day the detectives located Steinberg in a North Hollywood apartment and arrested him for assaulting the Deputy, evidence recovered pursuant to a search warrant at Steinberg’s apartment suggested foul play had transpired inside the apartment.
On July 2, 2003, human remains were discovered concealed in a container in a public storage unit located at 15460 Erwin Street in Van Nuys. The remains were identified as those of Christopher Walsh. The autopsy revealed Walsh had been shot to death. Devonshire Homicide retained investigative responsibility for the collateral murder of Walsh based on the likely connection to the prior assault on the deputy.
An exhaustive investigation has resulted in the issuance of a murder arrest warrant for David Steinberg, as well as for his accomplice, Jeffrey Lawrence Weaver. Additionally, an accessory to murder allegation was charged on two other associates identified as Tony Shane Wilson and George Jassick. Steinberg has been in custody on the prior charge and is to be arraigned for the murder of Christopher Walsh on February 4, 2004, in San Fernando Court.
Homicide detectives and field agents from the California Department of Corrections Parole located and arrested Tony Shane Wilson on February 3, 2004, at a residence located in the 11200 block of Blix Street in Toluca Lake. One hour later George Jassick was arrested at his work location in the Hollywood area. Both Wilson and Jassick remain in custody pending arraignment on February 4, 2004, for the accessory to murder charges.
Suspect Jeffrey Weaver is still at large. He is believed to be in the Southern California area. Weaver is also wanted in connection with an armed business robbery that occurred on January 11, 2004, in the 18400 block of Burbank Boulevard in Reseda. Weaver is a career criminal and should be considered armed and dangerous.
Weaver is 34 years old Caucasian, 6’ 00, 250 lbs., blond hairs and blue eyes. A photograph of Weaver will be release during the news conference to alert the community and to ask for the public’s help in locating this extremely dangerous felon.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Devonshire Area Homicide Unit, at 818-756-8291.
Michael Gougis writes for the Los Angeles Daily News August 25, 2003:
In the upper middle-class neighborhood around Tupper Street in Granada Hills, David Michael Steinberg, Christopher Walsh and their friends stood out as teenagers, running wild and headed for trouble.
And they found it often enough. But while the others eventually straightened out their lives, Steinberg and Walsh kept on going toward lives of crime that belied their backgrounds as products of affluence with professional parents and good families.
Today Steinberg, 36, is behind bars – again – awaiting trial on charges of assault with a deadly weapon for shooting at a deputy sheriff on a street in Chatsworth earlier this year.
Walsh was charged in the incident also, but earlier this summer his bullet-riddled body was found stuffed into a garbage container, locked in a ministorage unit in Van Nuys.
Acquaintances and court records painted Walsh and Steinberg as two kids who had a lifetime of opportunities but started down the wrong road and, unlike several of their fellow troublemakers, never found the off-ramp back.
“There was a whole group of youngsters around there who were up to a whole bunch of mischief,” said attorney Ronald S. Miller, who represented Steinberg in one of his earlier scrapes with the law. “It was a bizarre group.
“I used to call them kiddy gangsters, wannabe wise guys. Most of them, I haven’t heard from in years. David is a nice kid, but he was always working an angle – he always had some scam going – but never getting anywhere.”
…Both were in their late teens when Miller first began representing Steinberg. He said they were part of a group of kids that called themselves the “Tupper Street Gang,” and that he represented several of them in small-drug cases and minor crimes.
Miller first heard the name, he recalled, when one of the members was involved in an argument in a doughnut shop and clouted someone across the face with a removable car stereo.
“They hung around together in the 1980s,” Miller said. “They all were from very good families. Their parents were educated, hard-working people. They weren’t gang-bangers raising gang members.”
Steinberg’s criminal history, authorities said, included a misdemeanor battery case in the 1980s and a kidnapping charge in 1989 that was reduced to a misdemeanor. Somewhere along the line, court records show, he developed drug- and steroid-abuse problems.
In 1992, he was charged in federal court with conspiracy, carrying and using a firearm during a drug trafficking crime, and possession and transfer of counterfeit currency. He was convicted and sent to federal prison but appealed and won a new trial. He eventually reached a plea agreement for time served and was released.
In 2001, he was convicted of grand theft auto and possession of brass knuckles and sentenced to 16 months in state prison. He was released in 2002 but served a few more days in prison on a parole violation earlier this year before being arrested on the assault with a deadly weapon charge.
Prosecutors said Walsh, a salesman who never married, harbored and concealed Steinberg from police after the shooting in January.
In addition, prosecutors said that in January, Walsh unlawfully owned a .40-caliber Glock pistol, a .22-caliber rifle and a shotgun. It was illegal for Walsh to own them, court records show, because he had a misdemeanor spousal abuse conviction in 2001; two people had restraining orders pending against him.
Steinberg and Walsh were charged in early June. A month later, neighbors near a ministorage facility on Erwin Street in Van Nuys alerted authorities to a foul odor emanating from one of the units. When investigators arrived, they found a plastic trash bin within; inside that was the badly decomposed body of Walsh.