Description of Suspect Was Lying Through Teeth

Detective Sgt. Gordon Redding knows his fugitives.

He’s been a San Diego cop for 25 years. He’s a founding member of the Police Department’s fugitive apprehension unit, a manhunting squad which has made 1,036 arrests in two years.

Redding was sure he had finally caught the man wanted for a June, 1987, shooting in Ramona that left two party-goers dead and two others badly wounded. Acting on a tip received after Channel 39 showed a police mug shot of the suspect, Redding and Escondido officers surrounded a house in Escondido last Friday morning.

After a brief surveillance, they stopped their man at gunpoint, face down in the dust.

Everything fit. Right name (Jose Solorio), right description (5 feet, 9 inches, 150 pounds), right birthplace (Michoacan, Mexico). Right age (late 20s). Right kind of truck (dark blue pickup).

And, most convincing of all, right kind of distinguishing marks (two silver-capped front teeth). Just like on the poster listing Solorio as one of the area’s top 10 fugitives.

The man on the ground protested his innocence. You’ve got me confused with another Jose Solorio with silver teeth, he pleaded. Sure, pal.

Far-fetched explanations come with the territory for cops. But something seemed out of whack this time.

“There is no way a double-homicide suspect, a cold-blooded killer, is going to act the way this guy reacted,” Redding said. Too cooperative, too thoughtful.

So the group adjourned to the Escondido police station. Fingerprints proved that the apprehended Jose Solorio is not the Jose Solorio who is wanted for the Ramona killings.

Soon, the exonerated Solorio was on his way to his job as a construction worker--armed with a note signed by Redding telling the next cop who stops him that he is not the Jose Solorio.

Redding has had other cases in which someone had the same name or even birth date as a fugitive, but never a case where so many “satellite” details were also the same. He asked his man about the silver-capped teeth.

“I asked him if that was a common thing in Michoacan,” Redding said. “He said, no, that he had asked the dentist specifically for the silver caps. He said he got the silver because he wanted to be different.”

A Front-Page Mural

When it’s finished (in five to six weeks), it will be the biggest mural in downtown San Diego, 7,200 square feet on the back of a 6-story building at 620 C St.

Artists Kathleen King and Paul Naton won’t say exactly what the mural will look like, except that it will use, in part, the format of a newspaper front page to celebrate San Diego of the year 2050. The work has been commissioned, for an undisclosed amount, by the building owner.

King and Naton, who recently completed a mural to commemorate the centennial of Pacific Beach, prefer to work for private patrons rather than public agencies. Less bureaucracy, more creativity.

“At artist should not become entangled in committees,” King said.

Weighty Trash Matter

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so the city of San Diego began buying lightweight (40-pound) aluminum trash cans about a year ago.

Soon thereafter, however, the cans began disappearing off city streets, 60 in all over a period of months. At a cost of $260 to $300 apiece, that’s no laughing matter.

Trash officials and police officers went to recycling centers and scrap metal yards in San Diego, National City and Chula Vista--where aluminum fetches 40-60 cents a pound--to provide some friendly persuasion about not accepting hot cans. Some arrests were made.

Now the city is buying trash receptacles made of rock. They cost more ($350) but, at 950 to 1,000 pounds, they’re not as vulnerable to theft. (City crews merely empty the plastic liners.)

There is only one recorded incident of a rock can being disturbed. A mountainous man known only as The Animal tipped one over to retrieve part of a hot dog he had inadvertently thrown away.

“If we lose one of the rock cans,” said trash official Joe Perry, “we know exactly who we’ll talk to.”