Kamala Harris as San Francisco DA gave easy plea deal to man who brutally slaughtered gay Vietnam vet

A man who brutally killed a gay, Vietnam War veteran in 2002 and then lived with the body for a month was given a sweetheart plea deal by then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris — outraging the community at the time.Gary Lee Ober met his killer James McKinnon at a bar in San Francisco and took him to his apartment in Glen Park.After a scuffle, McKinnon stabbed Ober to death.As Ober’s corpse rotted in a bathtub, McKinnon covered it with baking soda to help cover the odor.

When Stephanie Henry, Ober’s neighbor, came to call on him, a well-dressed McKinnon came to the door and told her that Ober was on a $7,000 Walt Disney cruise vacation he’d won, SFGate reported at the time.“I am still in therapy,” Henry told The Post this week, saying she remembered the day she looked out her own peep hole and noticed flies buzzing around her door.Eventually the fire department was called.“[The firemen] broke the window and went in and he came out and [the firefighter] was white as snow,” she recalled.

“The maggots were in droves.Millions of maggots,” Henry recalled.

“If it wasn’t for my mom being there to support me, I probably would have gone into the hospital for a week or so.”In a jailhouse confession, McKinnon said he acted in self defense – a claim belied by the fact that Ober suffered from a back condition and had difficulty walking, according to the local Bay Area Reporter.When Kamala Harris came into office in 2004 she promised to get tough on crime — but inherited a backlog of cases from her predecessor Terence Hallinan.

One of those was the McKinnon case.In 2005 — three years after the slaying — Harris agreed to a plea-bargain that allowed McKinnon to cop to voluntary manslaughter and get a six-year sentence with credit for time served.

The deal also allowed McKinnon to skirt an elder abuse charge he was also facing.McKinnon was a free man just two years later after securing parole in 2007.Elliot Beckelman, an assistan...