A benefit concert will be held at a sports bar on Saturday for a mother of three whose body was found strangled March 2 in a parked car in Burbank.
Up to 200 people are expected Saturday at the Steel Pit Sports Grill in Tujunga to remember the life of Dorothy McGuire.
The Tujunga woman was killed allegedly by an acquaintance after a night at a bar celebrating a friend’s pending wedding.
The acquaintance, David Andrew Perry, 43, of Burbank, is being held on a murder charge and other felonies at the Los Angeles County Jail with bail at $1.2 million. He’s expected to be arraigned on April 3.
Court Documents: Read the Criminal Complaint
His public defender, Victor Gerson, did not immediately return a call.
He’s accused of strangling McGuire, possibly on La Tuna Road in Tujunga, and then driving with her in his car to the Burbank home of his parents, where he lived.
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McGuire’s boyfriend and his friend discovered her body in Perry’s Kia that was parked in the driveway, police and McGuire’s stepmother said. They had gone there looking for her when she didn't come home the night before.
The stepmother, Coreen Hendley, said McGuire struggled with narcotics addiction, but had begun attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings after the birth six years ago of her daughter, her third child.
“It was her daughter coming into her life that made her realize that she needed to get her life together,” Hendley said. “She loved her daughter so much.”
McGuire met Perry at his wedding in Las Vegas four years ago and had once had him over to look at wedding photos, Hendley said.
While Henley and others struggled to cope with McGuire’s violent death, she said she wanted to remember how McGuire was working to turn her life around.
She had been recently working through her second interview as a pharmacy technician at CVS after recently getting her certificate.
She said she had recently reunited with her two estranged children from a previous marriage - a 13-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son.
“Her dad is really, really having a tough time with this,” said Hendley, who along with McGuire’s father is taking care of her the daughter. “I don’t know what else to say.”
Family and friends wrote moving tributes to her on Facebook.
"Dorothy Mcguire was a bright young woman who was actively building her future. She was callously murdered a short while ago, leaving behind three children and a LOT of people who loved her."
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