David Meier, who has been prosecuting murders as head of the homicide unit in the Suffolk district attorney's office for 11 years, will leave at the end of the year, officials said yesterday.
Meier called Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley at home Sunday night and told him that his last day would be Dec. 31.
Meier did not return several calls for comment last night, but a friend who did not want to be identified said he was leaving for family reasons.
"I have tremendous respect for him professionally," Conley said in an interview yesterday. "I hold him in the highest personal regard. I told him that, and he knows that he has 100 percent of my faith and confidence in the job he was doing as head of the unit."
Tensions had flared between Conley and Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis in recent months after Davis replaced Daniel Coleman, head of the Police Department's Homicide Unit, whose detectives worked closely with Meier. The change, which Davis made without consulting Conley, infuriated the district attorney.
Conley's spokesman, Jake Wark, said Meier's departure had nothing to do with those tensions, which Davis and Conley recently said have eased.
In a prepared statement, Davis described Meier as a "superb prosecutor, who has worked tirelessly for the city of Boston."
"We will be sad to see him go," he said.
Meier, who is originally from California, has been a prosecutor for 25 years, Conley said. He earned respect in his field as a skilled lawyer who was as dogged about overturning wrongful convictions as he was about prosecuting accused killers.
In 1999, he helped free Donnell Johnson, a 21-year-old who had been sentenced to life in prison for the fatal shooting of a 9-year-old child on Halloween in 1994, as he counted his candy in a Roxbury courtyard.
In April 1999, Meier asked a judge to release Marlon Passley, helping to free the man from a life sentence without parole for the 1995 murder of Tennyson Drakes and the wounding of two other men. Meier prosecuted John Tibbs for the murder last month, but the jury was deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial.
"In my experience, he was very ethical and concerned about doing what is in the interest of justice and not simply in winning," said Charles Rankin, a defense lawyer who faced off with Meier in the courtroom several times in the last 10 to 15 years. "I think he brought a lot of credit to Dan Conley's office by being willing to examine older cases that had been prosecuted years before when questions were raised."
Ralph C. Martin II, who was district attorney before Conley, hired Meier in 1996. He recalled the young assistant district attorneys who looked up to Meier.
"I called them 'David's kids,' " Martin said. "He's an icon in the profession."
John Ellement of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
