Area prosecutors spent three years decrying state corrections for granting extremely violent offenders surprisingly early parole – now they say a worse-case scenario has come to pass

It was Sacramento police officers who first arrived at the house, a barebones dwelling with a garage extending off its north wing and bedroom reaching from its south, giving it the shape of a stubbed horseshoe behind a chain-link fence and falling shadows from an elm tree.

They’d pulled up at four in the morning on July 19^th, 2022.

The officers began approaching a front yard thick with brush and weeds.

Their call was on Field Street. It had only seven structures, which formed a kind of tunnel between their facades and a high row of hedges separating them from the busy lanes of Watt Avenue. The officers had been sent to an address at the dead center. And they’d been warned about the conditions inside. A transient woman had called about suspicious circumstances at the house, but she had also cautioned they’d be entering a hoarder’s den.

This was no exaggeration.

At first, Sacramento police couldn’t even make entry. The doors and windows were essentially barricaded by piled clutter, mildewing mounds and the darkened signs of overflowing refuse. The home belonged to 77-year-old Pamela May. Her husband, Tom, was being cared for at a skilled nursing facility in Del Paso Heights. That meant that May, a self-described “night owl,” had been living alone there for some time. But when the responders squeezed their way in, there were no sign of May anywhere.  

One of the officers, Dillon Bortmas, would later have his body camera footage submitted into evidence.

In it, Bortmas glances around as one of his partners – an Officer Smith – is heard saying, “There is so much stuff crawling in here … This is probably the worst house I’ve ever been in.” Then, after a beat, “It’s official – I’ve never been in one this bad.”

“What’s over there?” Bortmas asks.

“Well, there’s some blood on stuff over here,” Smith tells him.

Bortmas looks: “There’s blood?”

“Yeah, a little bit, but I can see blood on the top layer over here,” Smith observes. “I mean, it’s blood. I can definitely tell it looks like blood. And it’s on the very top of everything.”

The footage shows the officers continue to search.

“And there’s a couple of rooms with blood,” Smith notes, “on this wood; on that blanket; and on this tub.”

“Oh, I see that,” Bortmas says.

A few seconds later, Smith mutters, “This is horrible.”

It would soon be established that Pamela May was actually a North Highlands resident. Field Street is near the southeast corner of McClellan Park just past the edge of the city. The Sheriff’s Office had direct jurisdiction. The next person to rollup was a deputy named Blake Grinder.

Two years later, Grinder would testify in a preliminary hearing about what happened once he got there.

He started with the house’s stupefying odor.

“The best way to describe it is probably months and months of just moldy, decaying food,” Grinder recalled on the stand. “It smelled like dead animals in there. I had to duck while standing on garbage to avoid hitting my head on the ceiling … It was almost impossible to move through the house … Feces, urine. Like miscellaneous, you know, furniture. I mean, it was chest-high.”

Grinder struggled to wedge his way into a bedroom. He eventually got in, only to find himself standing on a refrigerator centered on a pyramid of garbage. The deputy had to hunch in a fetal position to avoid hitting his head. Grinder’s back-up on the call was a Deputy Jones, who he was speaking with as he grabbed a broomstick to start digging through the lagoon of trash. Then, Grinder spotted some black plastic bags that just looked off to him. The camera he wore that morning captures him pulling out a knife to cut open one of the bags and peer inside.

“Oh fuck,” Grinder says.

“What’s in the bag?” Jones ventures.

Grinder answers, “I think it’s body parts.”

Earlier in the month, Pamela May met a stranger on the street. He presented himself in the guise of a helpful and respectful younger man, someone who wanted to help a senior member of his community with her groceries. That stranger followed her home, then learned the layout of her property, then waited for his moment to launch a plan that would soon turn the stomachs of even seasoned law enforcement officers.

But Pamela May was never supposed to meet that stranger. According to the combined rulings of two judges, the predator who was stalking May on that afternoon was supposed to be in state prison for 12 years. The reason he wasn’t, from the perspective of victims’ groups, is that there’s currently “no truth in sentencing” in the state of California. They’re not alone in that view. For several years, the district attorneys of Placer, Sacramento and Amador counties have been raising alarm bells about how the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is calculating inmates’ “credits” for early release. And in a tragic twist of irony, what happened to Pamela May involves all three of those counties.

Those district attorneys, each of whom has spoken to SN&R, argue that the Department of Corrections’ system for awarding inmate credits under Prop. 57 is shrouded in absolute mystery, while at the same time resulting in violent offenders being released years and years before they were supposed to get their first parole hearing.

The stranger who followed Pamela May home had only served a third of his prison sentence before he was released by CDCR.

An awful comprehension    

Following that moment Deputy Grinder looked in the trash sack, he and Jones quickly called the Sacramento Sheriff’s homicide unit. They were told to pull each of the suspicious bags outside and establish that they were, in fact, packed with human remains.

“The bags were so heavy,” Grinder remembered in court. “I’ll never forget that. And I knew that it was an impossible task to bring one of those out of the house.”

He and Jones ultimately pried a small swamp cooler from a window space in order to “make a tunnel” through the bedroom’s labyrinth of waste. Grinder crawled inside, managing, in the end, to haul each bag out near the dead brown grass.         

Once the deputies had opened them, there was no longer a question.

The grisly details of the bags’ contents is specified in a Sacramento County court file, though too graphic for SN&R to responsibly convey with precision.

One thing was certain when they were discovered, though – murder police were on their way.

Sheriff investigators started backtracking how Sacramento police ended up at the house in the first place. They learned that the woman who called 911 was camping in a trailer near Arden Boulevard by the train tracks. When that witness spoke with a dispatcher, her breathing was so stressed that she was told to stop, wait and calm herself. The caller said that she’d learned of a terrible secret inside the house on Field Street, adding that the man responsible for it was someone she’d known for decades – 44-year-old Darnell Erby.

As it turns out, there were a number of attorneys in different counties who’d be surprised to know Erby could even be a suspect. After all, he was supposed to be in prison at that moment, and for another eight years.  

Erby grew up in Del Paso Heights. He has a rap sheet long enough for law enforcement to consider him a career criminal. In 2017, Erby was arrested and convicted of a first-degree residential burglary in Placer County. This came after he snuck into an attached garage while the owner of the property was home in a nearby room of the house. Roseville police caught Erby in the act before engaging in a foot pursuit with him. During that same timeframe, while out of custody, Erby was also arrested in Amador County for identify theft and forgery exceeding $950. He was convicted of his respective crimes in both counites. Erby’s combined sentence in 2017 for the Placer and Amador offenses was 12 years in state prison.

He was released by CDCR staff in 2021

Within hours of Grinder and Jones opening the plastic bags, Erby was sitting inside an interview room at the Sheriff’s Centralized Investigations Division. He was staring at detectives Vitaly Prokopchuk and Nick Sareenam.

A recorder was running as they questioned him. It captured Erby acknowledge that he first met Pamela May while she was pushing a cart of shopping supplies near Watt Avenue. Erby referred to her off-handedly as “Mama May.” He recounted that, in that initial encounter, he’d offered to drive May with her groceries back to her place.

“I brung ’em in that nasty ass house,” Erby told the detectives. “It stunk like a mother fucker … She was like a hoarder or something, bro.”

Erby claimed that he’d then offered to do some yard work around May’s property. Pressed by the investigators, Erby admitted that he’d returned to May’s house at least seven times after their first meeting.   

“Is there anything we should be concerned about that’s in your car?” Prokopchuk inquired.

“I have a machete right there,” Erby said. “I always carry this big ass, long machete, just so I don’t feel afraid, you know, like that.”

“For how long did you have the machete?” Prokopchuk asked.

“Forever,” Erby replied. “I go everywhere with that machete.”

At another point in the interview, Erby tried claiming that he had a second personality called Double D.

“I don’t know where I’m at, or what I’ve done,” Erby mentioned about Double D supposedly taking over. “The drug stuff is what makes my barrier go down.”

“What drugs?”

“Meth.”

“Medication that’s prescribed or just illegal drugs?” Prokopchuk clarified.

“No, just illegal drugs,” Erby said. “Meth.”

What Erby didn’t know is that detectives were already piecing together what had happened. According to their investigation, sometime around July 15, 2022, Erby used a hole he’d previously spotted in May’s chain-link fence to get onto her property. He then skulked into her unnavigable house, attacked her, and used “her clothing to bind her face and hands.”

It is believed that, at some point, Erby slit May’s throat with a knife. At least, that’s what Erby told several people in a nearby homeless encampment a couple days later – and this admission generally lines up with known evidence in the case.

Late into his contact with detectives, Erby began to act as if his self-proclaimed alternative personality was manifesting. Conjuring the supposed voice of Double D, he told investigators that “Darnell don’t know nothing.”  

If detectives were skeptical, it was probably because – according to several witnesses in a homeless encampment – Erby had taken a number of May’s belongings there to burn them in a camp fire. He ultimately informed denizens of the camp that he needed to “get rid of a body” and then tried pulling them into a conversation about whether he should take it to a pig farm.

“The insinuation being that the pigs would eat the body and it would be disposed of in that regard,” Detective Sareenam testified in a hearing. “And there was also mention of going to Lake Tahoe and placing the body in the lake, but there was no boat, so that was not feasible at the time.”

Erby’s court file indicates that he eventually went into nauseating detail with the campers about the process of dismembering May’s corpse, as well as mentioning a scheme that he’d concocted to transfer the title of her house into his own name. Throughout these focused proclamations around the campfire, there was apparently no mention of the elusive “Double D.” Witness statements read like it was just plain old Darnell Erby describing the worst thing he’d ever done with no signs of remorse.

On June 17, 2025, Sacramento Deputy DA James Wax convinced a jury to find Erby guilty of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of mutilation, along with five counts of burglary while being armed with a deadly weapon. Erby was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But the story wasn’t over. Back in 2017, Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire and Amador County District Attorney Todd Riebe both had every reason to believe they’d taken Erby off the streets for over a decade.

Or, on paper they did.

Now, learning of the fate that befell Pamala May, both wanted answers.  

Why was Darnell Erby free?

“When I heard that someone who had been sent to prison from Placer County was released, and was now accused of committing a murder in Sacramento, I wanted to know about it, because it represents a failure of some sort in the system,” Gire said during a sit-down with SN&R. “Then, I quickly found out that he was sentenced to 12 years in 2017, and that he’d only done four years of that sentence. It was, ‘Wait a minute, that math doesn’t work.’”

Gire says he was worried that Erby’s case might fit into an ongoing frustration he’s had with CDCR’s secrecy around how it calculates early release credits.

“I thought this had to be an artificial calculation of numbers,” Gire stressed, “with them wanting him out because he represented a number, and the state has been trying to get a certain total number of inmates released; and they’ll do whatever they have to do to get there.” 

In the aftermath of May’s killing, Gire wrote a letter to the secretary of CDCR requesting information. Despite being the top elected law enforcement official in one of the most populace counties in the region, Gire says that he was promptly ignored. CBS News reporter Julie Watts, based in Sacramento, then spent months pressing CDCR officials about why Erby was released while only having served a third of his sentence. That pressure from Watts eventually resulted in CDCR leadership giving two different answers. First, prison officials asserted that Erby had qualified as ‘time served’ under the early release credits that they were allowed to grant him. Then, CDCR officials changed their story, claiming that Erby was released under a different section of Prop.57, one that authorizes them to grant early paroles that are separate and distinct from their credit-awarding system. In that second scenario, the law compels CDCR to send the Placer County DA’s Office a letter notifying them of its decision, which never happened in Erby’s case.

CDCR officials told Watts that they simply “forgot to notify the DA” and that they apologized for the oversight.      

In direct communications between SN&R and California Correctional officials this year, spokeswoman Emily Humpal defended how her department issues inmate credits towards early release, stating in an email that CDCR is legally empowered to award those credits to prisoners who have participated in rehabilitative programming. Humpal acknowledged that CDCR  “does not disclose information on credits earned while incarcerated.”

Not to journalists.

Not to the top elected prosecutors who sent those very inmates to prison in the first place, and who are also charged with shepherding the surviving victims and family members.

None of this sits well with Gire, who asserts that – regardless of which Prop. 57 tool was used to get Erby back on the streets – CDCR personnel clearly failed at an adequate risk assessment. 

“Once you take a quick look at Erby’s criminal history, you know this man does not belong outside of custody,” Gire emphasized. “He has failed at every opportunity. He’s never been out for more than three or four months without violating his parole … He doesn’t do any [rehabilitation] programming when he’s in [jail or prison]. In all categories, this is a no-brainer when it comes to someone who shouldn’t be released or given any sort of chance at early parole.”    

District Attorney Todd Riebe has his own concerns.

“Erby should not have been released early,” Riebe agreed. “Our criminal justice system has failed to keep California citizens safe, and Proposition 57 is the biggest culprit. Unfortunately, these kinds of senseless and avoidable tragedies will continue to occur until citizens demand change and accountability for a system badly broken.”

Another point that Gire and Riebe see eye-to-eye on has to do with the fact that Erby was previously burglarizing properties while their homeowners were present, something they think should have been a wake-up call to CDCR personnel about the trajectory he was on 

“This is what he does – he goes to other peoples’ homes and commits crimes,” Gire said. “Once someone goes down that road, it is sadly very predictable to know that the level of danger is going to increase, and the potential for violence is almost guaranteed.”