Witnesses Sought to Brutal Pico-Union Murder

No one knows why Carmen Leon hesitated when the men came beating on the bus bench, yelling gang names and claiming it as their territory. The others waiting with her fled, but she waited a moment too long.

When she finally started to run, at least two men chased her, one with a steel pipe, another swinging an aluminum baseball bat. Leon darted into the street, wobbling on her 3-inch heels. She dodged traffic, ran across an intersection and was only four doors from home when they caught up with her, police said.

The men watched as she tripped and fell on the sidewalk. One of them then bashed her head in with his bat until her plaid miniskirt, blouse and jacket were stained with blood. She died in the hospital later that night.

That was three weeks ago, around midnight on Sept. 2, near a graffiti-covered bus stop in the Pico-Union area near downtown. Rampart Division police say the bus stop on Pico Boulevard at Albany Street is sandwiched between two areas containing the largest concentrations of gangs in their division.

Leon’s killers got away. But two days later, police arrested two reputed gang members, who have been charged in the murder of Leon, a 32-year-old Colombian immigrant.

Since then, police have been building a case against the two. In an effort to find more witnesses to the crime, representatives of the Police Department, the district attorney’s office and the Rapid Transit District got together Thursday to plaster posters with Leon’s picture on bus stops and in storefronts throughout the neighborhood.

“We are here to try to stir the general public, the neighbors, the shopkeepers here,” said Police Detective Ron Vega, who said residents may be too frightened by the gangs to come forward and offer information.

Carlos Lovos, 21, of Los Angeles, has been charged with murder. His companion, Martin Avila, 19, also of Los Angeles, was charged with conspiracy to commit assault with a deadly weapon. Both are in County Jail awaiting their preliminary hearing set for Nov. 1.

Police say the case against the two is largely circumstantial; they hope the publicity will draw more witnesses forward. “We have a good case, but you never know, people may get stirred over this and come forward,” Vega said. In addition, they say, there may be other suspects.

RTD police, who are cooperating with the Police Department because Leon was waiting at a bus bench, said that they only post photographs of victims or suspects when the crime is particularly heinous.

“It’s only been done a couple of times in the past . . . but we were just appalled by this murder,” said RTD Detective Bill Thompson.

Moses Ledesma owns Pico Auto Parts, which sits behind the bus bench where Leon was waiting. “This is Pico Union. . . . You can’t even leave a garden hose out here,” he said.

May Call Police

Ledesma said that despite the fear many residents have of going to the police, those who have been hurt, robbed or bothered by gang members and dope dealers will probably call police if they saw something that night.

“I can’t understand why they would kill her,” said Leon’s neighbor Auraluz Lozano. “She was very beautiful, very nice.”

She was one of many who remembered Leon as a generous soul who would often volunteer to baby-sit and houseclean for neighbors who were ill or down on their luck.

“Carmen would clean up the house, do the cooking, she would even wash all the clothes and serve the food,” Lozano said.

Leon had come to the United States about five years ago and worked off and on as a housekeeper to support herself. She was studying English at a church across the street, sending money to her mother in Colombia and saving to bring her teen-age son here.

“She was such a sweet person,” said Pennie Gallagher, a Calabasas woman who had hired Leon to care for her 19-month-old daughter, Seaton, six weeks ago.

‘She was so intelligent and witty. She was learning English, and she would study here,” Gallagher said. “She’d ask me all sorts of questions, about American history, and what did Thanksgiving mean? She was so interested in everything. She was going to go so far.”

Leon lived in the Gallagher home Mondays through Fridays, taking Seaton to the park and teaching her how to say “please.”

Weekend Trip Home

The baby still cries out for her, Gallagher said. “Carmen, Carmen, bus,” she says, thinking that her parents have dropped the baby-sitter off at a local bus stop for the 40-mile trip home, as they did each weekend.

“A million things went through our mind,” when they learned of Leon’s death, Gallagher said. “Why didn’t we plan something for that evening and ask her to stay over?”

No one is sure what Leon was doing at the bus stop so late at night, in a miniskirt and heels. Friends and neighbors said Leon loved to dance to a Colombian type of salsa music called cumbias and that she could have been going to a nightclub.

But Anna Maria Alfaro, with whom Leon would sometimes go dancing, said she called Leon a couple of hours before she was killed and that “Carmen said she was not going out that night.”

The last time Antonio Leon saw his only sister alive, he was delivering a mattress to her apartment so she would have somewhere to sleep. Two weeks ago, he removed that mattress and cleared out the rest of her belongings.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s so tough,” he said. “I play chess, and I guess you have to move one piece at a time.”