Two days after the homicides, a DEA agent came to the Downey police station with a key piece of evidence. At this point he considered Garcia “more of a victim” than a suspect, Bejines testified. “He wasn’t believing me.”īejines testified that Garcia told him he’d gone to Valencia’s shop to look at some rims when a Latino man with a bald head and tattoos shot him with a chrome handgun. “I’m telling him the truth,” Garcia testified. Seeing the detective had made up his mind, Garcia refused to talk to him. Garcia testified that he told Bejines he’d gone to pick up money Valencia owed him, but the detective just “smirked at me and said, ‘You sure?’ ” Bejines asked if he’d gone there to rob someone, Garcia testified. Garcia and Bejines recalled the conversation differently. He told another veteran of his gang, Blythe Street, he was going to “clean out house.” When Ezequiel Romo came home to Panorama City after 18 years in prison, he didn’t like what he saw. “He decided to be judge, jury and executioner,” he said.įor Subscribers After 18 years in prison, he took over his old L.A. Garcia’s attorney, Anthony Willoughby, said he has never in his 34 years of practicing law seen a detective shade, distort and bury facts like Bejines did. The investigation was so compromised - by sloppiness, by a detective’s tunnel vision - that the truth of what happened may never be known. He was jailed for nine months on charges a judge eventually dismissed. Garcia’s case illustrates how this process can go terribly wrong. Who is seen as a suspect and who is considered a victim. This story unfolds along the timeline the detective described in his testimony.Įvery step of an investigation is a conscious choice: Whom to interview. Now that the case is over, The Times has access to records Bejines says he had not yet seen when he placed Garcia under arrest. The evidence was conflicting and did not come out all at once. The civil case, which a jury heard in downtown Los Angeles in early May, was a painstaking examination of how police investigate the chaos of violent death.īejines’ attorney stressed to the jury that the question before them was a narrow one: Not whether Garcia was innocent, but whether it was reasonable for the detective to have believed Garcia had committed a crime based on what he knew at the time of the arrest, just four days after the homicides. Garcia then sued the detective who arrested him, Carlos Bejines, alleging the Downey policeman had disregarded evidence that suggested he was not the perpetrator of a robbery but the victim of an ambush.
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