Steven Parent: El Monte teen, Manson family victim


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Friday morning August 8, 1969.

The sun is fully visible at 6:10 a.m.

At 7:50 a.m. Steven Earl Parent, 18, leaves his parents’ El Monte home on Bryant Road for work at Valley City Plumbing in Rosemead.

A recent graduate of Arroyo High School, Parent works two jobs. He plans on attending Citrus College in the fall semester.

Parent’s co-workers say he is “clean-cut” and “intelligent.” “A good worker.”

He splits work at 5:15 p.m. and heads to the second job, at Jonas Miller Stereo on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

At 7:48 p.m. sunset envelopes Southern California.

Sometime after 11 p.m., Parent gets off work. He’s driving his dad’s 1966 AMC Rambler.

Parent heads up Beverly to Sunset, then jogs north again on Benedict Canyon Road.

A waning crescent moon barely lights the night sky. Oleanders and scrub oak line the unlit road. He turns again on Cielo Drive.

At 11:45 p.m., Parent demonstrates an AM/FM Sony Digimatic clock radio. He hopes to sell it to Bill Garretson, his 19-year-old friend.

The two met several weeks earlier, when Parent picked up Garretson hitchhiking and drove him home.

Garretson lives in the back house at the estate on Cielo Drive. He takes care of the owner’s dogs.

Garretson declines to buy the radio. Parent drinks a can of beer. He calls a friend.

It’s now Saturday morning August 9 – 12:15 a.m. Parent leaves.

In the dark, he walks back to his dad’s white Rambler. He starts his car and heads toward the gate.

He rolls down the window to use a push button gate opener.

A figure approaches.

“Halt,” a man calls out. The man’s got a buck knife in one hand and a .22 in the other.

Parent pleads with the man, “Please don’t hurt me. I won’t tell anyone.”

The man slashes at Parent with the knife, slicing the teen’s wrist. Then, he opens fire with the revolver. Shots strike the El Monte teen in the head and chest. By 12:30 a.m. Parent is dead.

He would become the first victim in a two-night killing frenzy led by Charles Manson and carried out by members of his LSD-crazed “family.”

Within minutes, Parent’s murderer, Charles “Tex” Watson, and three women would enter the main house at Cielo Drive and kill actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, film producer Wojciech Frykowski and hair dresser Jay Sebring.

In hopes of inciting a race war that Manson called “Helter Skelter,” the killers struck the next night at the Los Feliz home of and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

Parent’s body was discovered about 24 hours after he left his parent’s El Monte home for work. His mom and dad were disturbed that LAPD officials didn’t notify them of their son’s death for several hours.

His dad wondered what Steven was up to.

“I just can’t understand what he was doing up there in the first place,” Wilfred Parent said. “Hell, Steve wasn’t a poshy kind of kid. I didn’t even know he knew any of those people.”

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38 thoughts on “Steven Parent: El Monte teen, Manson family victim

  1. I did research on this Charles Manson Case because of the fact i live in Chatsworth,Ca.It still shocks me that Charles Manson himself is alive after all this time. Sad Story that tortured many drugged innocent people with barely any evidence. I just visited where the Manson Caves are by the traintracks and it amazes me. crime scene investigator is my dream

  2. I did research on this Charles Manson Case because of the fact i live in Chatsworth,Ca.It still shocks me that Charles Manson himself is alive after all this time. Sad Story that tortured many drugged innocent people with barely any evidence. I just visited where the Manson Caves are by the traintracks and it amazes me. crime scene investigations

  3. Steve Earl Parent was my Uncle and i never got to meet him. My dad told me the story a couple of years ago and to this day i still can’t believe they killed my Uncle. I really wish I could have met him too

  4. We lived two doors away from the Parents on Cypress Dr, which used to be Central Ave in the the 50’s and early sixties from 1954 to 1963. I knew Steven who was three years younger than me but we never played together. I delivered the paper to his house.

    When returning from a vacation in Arkansas by car, we noticed our garage had been broken into and a clock radio from my Dad’s workbench was missing. I knew Steven was into tearing apart radios and rebuilding them because I did the same thing…except I didn’t go looking for them in other people’s houses.

    We confronted Steven and his father who went into his room and retrieved our radio, in pieces. He was apologetic and assured us it would be fully reassembled and returned to us. I can’t recall if my Dad called the El Monte police or not, but I do recall Steven coming over to the house and bringing back the radio and giving to my Mom. It worked!! I always thought that whole episode was bizarre and we moved away shortly after that. It was while I was in college I heard about the killings and was shocked to see Steven’s name among the victims. I felt really bad since even though he stole from us, I felt he was a good kid.

  5. My stepdad worked with Steve Parent. I read somewhere there is a cia connection with these murders.

  6. This is so sad when it happened. Still sad today. To AJ Parent is your grandparents still alive?

  7. well he didn’t know them, he knew the temporary care taker/dog sitter on the property and only briefly giving him a ride weeks earlier. It was simply really really wrong place wrong time………………coulda shoulda woulda, but if he had skipped the beer, he might have gotten away in the nick of time.

    • Was William Garretson, the caretaker, considered a friend of Roman and Sharon? I have been curious about that, and have not found any info on it anywhere?

    • Of course the movie the Haunting of Sharon Tate shows Steven having a friendship with Sharon but he did not. Steven definitely was innocent. I can’t see how some of the women have gotten out of prison.

    • I certainly would hope so! Such a sad situation. This young man had his entire life ahead of him! Just makes me so sad!

  8. I wonder who the writer and editor are? So many articles here with endless misspelled words and sentences that make absolutely no sense. Please hire some new editors and a spell checker too.

    • I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t see any misspelled words or any sentences that don’t make sense.

        • Okay, but that one error hardly justifies saying that the entire article has “endless misspelled words and sentences that make absolutely no sense”.

  9. Amazing, some little trivial thing happens and it leads to something like what happened to Parent. If he leaves a minute sooner maybe he’s still alive today. Life can be such a sick joke sometimes.

    • Was William Garretson, the caretaker, considered a friend of Roman and Sharon? I have been curious about that, and have not found any info on it anywhere??

    • I kind of doubt that, because Bill Vega is not gay, and probably would not have been friends with Steve, if he thought Steve was gay. Bill lived in El Monte at that time, and still lived in El Monte when I met him many years ago, but then moved to another city, which I won’t mention here. He was living with his sickly parents, and saving money to buy a house. When his mother died of cancer, Bill moved out, and then his father died from whatever. I believe Bill went to school with Steve, but I am not positive.

      • Well, If Steve were gay he would have been in the closet and probably wouldn’t have let your friend know. So…

        • You are absolutely correct, Ron-he. I was not thinking clearly when I made that posting. Back then, it was ILLEGAL to be openly gay, so murder victim Steve Parent would definitely NOT be inclined to talk about it, if he was indeed gay, which he surely could have been. Thank You for bringing this to my attention.

    • Not in any records was there an indication of a homosexual relationship. I believe the clock radio which would have been more of a novelty in ’69 was hot and he was trying to turn a buck. My father was a school teacher in El Monte and personally knew Steve and this was in line with a logical reason for him being at the house.

  10. Such a tragedy, no matter how you look at it. I cannot comprehend how these families have dealt with, and persevered through all of this. Sobering to realize that in a split second, your life, and those of your families and friends can be irrevocably changed forever, and you find yourself on a path that you never would have chosen.

    • Was William Garretson, the caretaker, considered a friend of Roman and Sharon? I have been curious about that, and have not found any info on it anywhere.

  11. “members of his LSD-crazed ‘family.'” No one doing the murders was on LSD. Everyone was straight. Where did LSD-crazed “family.” come from?

    • Krenwinkle talked about her and Manson having dropped acid over 50 times so while Atkins said her & Watson took speed before going to the Tate home they all had been LSD users many times

  12. Was William Garretson, the caretaker, considered a friend of Roman and Sharon? I have been curious about that, and have not found any info on it anywhere.

  13. Sharon went home because she wanted to have her baby in America. Roman and a friend tried to get her to stay.

  14. i just watched the movie ‘The Haunting of Sharon Tate’. Reviews were not good. 50 yrs ago now, remember as if it was yesterday. Epic tragic. Melcher and Candace Bergen sure split from that house knowing there were problems with Manson. Polanski and Tate should have been made aware of what was going on. Manson was orchestrating creepy crawly expiditions, entering homes, moving furniture around while the residents were sound asleep. They wake up to a whole new floor plan. That Garrett guy, he seemed really mentally challenged to the max.

  15. Susan Atkins said they were all doing Acid.. If you’ve ever done Acid ( & I’m not saying I have ) It doesn’t give you homicidal urges, it doesn’t want to make you kill.. People just need to get use to the fact that some people are not good, they are evil.. And if you can let a dirty, smelly midget hippie with a Christ complex take control of your brain then you probably deserve what you get because Sharon Tate, her unborn son along with the rest of the people at that house & everybody else that died during their murder spree didn’t.. I’ve heard every Manson family member involved except Charles blame it on drugs & to the ones still alive I say man up & take responsibility for your actions & quit trying to take the easy way out & blame it on drugs.. When someone gets drunk & makes an ___ out of themselves all they’ve done is tell you what they are already thinking..

  16. On a side note, the fancy pet carrier used in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ actually did belong to Sharon Tate. Tate’s sister allowed Tarantino to use the carrier and some of Tate’s actual jewelry.

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