As an Oakland man walked out of San Quentin, police were waiting with a murder warrant

OAKLAND — Last Jan. 6 was supposed to be DaJean Evans’ first day out of prison, but he never made it past the gate at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Law enforcement officials were waiting for him, serving him with a criminal complaint as he stepped into what he thought was freedom. Now Evans, 26, is sitting inside Dublin’s Santa Rita Jail, facing charges of murder, robbery, and gun possession as a felon. He has pleaded not guilty, court records show.

Evans’ whirlwind legal problems all stem from the same fateful day. He is charged in the May 25, 2022 killing of 49-year-old Andre McFee in Oakland. When he was arrested last January, he had just finished serving a five-year prison sentence for carjacking a person at Fruitvale BART hours before McFee was shot and killed on the 8800 block of Birch Street.

Inside San Quentin, Evans was prospering, according to others who knew him at the prison. He took advantage of rehabilitation programs and gained notoriety on the in-house basketball team, the San Quentin Warriors, where the prison’s newspaper compared him and two teammates to NBA trios like “Steph-Klay-Draymond” and “Kareem-Magic-Worthy.” In an interview, he said he looked forward to taking a conflict resolution program out “to the streets.”

“Basketball-wise, I want to coach an Amateur Athletic Union team; take them traveling to places they normally wouldn’t go,” Evans told the San Quentin News.

McFee was shot and killed around 9:40 p.m., after exiting a vehicle and interacting with at least two other people, police said at the time. Investigators found two different caliber shell casings at the crime scene, and obtained video showing one of the shooters stand over him and fire at him as another grabbed McFee’s backpack and fled.

Hours later, on the early morning of May 26, 2022, Evans, 26-year-old Jamel Wilcox, and a then-17-year-old boy were chased from Contra Costa into Vallejo in a stolen silver Honda, authorities said. The car had been taken in a carjacking earlier on May 25, before McFee’s death, authorities said.

Inside the Honda, police found two guns, which were later matched to the ballistics evidence at McFee’s homicide scene, authorities said. They also found a backpack, which police say was full of suspected drugs and cash. Thus far, Evans is the only of the trio to be charged, court records show.

But prosecutors didn’t file the murder case against Evans until 2024. In the interim, he and Wilcox were both charged with carjacking. It’s unclear what charges the 17-year-old boy faced, as juvenile cases are restricted by confidentiality laws. In 2023, Evans pleaded no contest to a robbery count and received five years in state prison, court records show.

In court filings, police have said they investigated other suspects and theories behind McFee’s killing. One person told them that McFee had been set up for murder by a woman he knew, and another said a man killed McFee to take over his drug operation. The male suspect was found to have an alibi, authorities said.