Murder Suspect Salcido Is Flown Back to California

Accused wine country killer Ramon Salcido was returned to California Thursday night on a private jet, escorted by U.S. law enforcement officials who took him into custody in Mexico City more than 24 hours after his arrest by Mexican police near his grandmother’s home.

The jet landed about 9:15 p.m. at Brown Field in San Diego and was immediately surrounded by 20 law enforcement officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and San Diego Police Department. The plane cleared customs, refueled and flew on to Santa Rosa where Salcido was taken to the Sonoma County Jail.

Outside the jail, a crowd of about 150 people chanted “Kill him! Kill him!” A number were carrying crudely lettered placards, one of which said, “Salcido doesn’t deserve to live.”

Salcido was handed over to U.S. authorities in the culmination of an impromptu, three-day cooperative effort between Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials that was cleared at the highest levels in Mexico City and Washington.

“It was a cliff-hanger right up to the end,” a U.S. source said. “What made this happen is the president of Mexico (Carlos Salinas de Gortari) wanted it to happen. . . . The man said cooperate, find a way.”

With the bureaucratic stops removed, Salcido, 28, was captured less than a week after the killing rampage in Sonoma County. Six members of Salcido’s family and his winery supervisor were shot or knifed to death, and Salcido’s 3-year-old daughter and a co-worker were attacked but survived. Police suspect Salcido made his way to Calexico shortly after the murders.

A U.S. source familiar with the events that led to Salcido’s arrest said officials now believe that he took the bus across the border into Mexico from Calexico, in Imperial County. He rode the bus south to within two miles of his hometown of Los Mochis, an agricultural and seafood-processing city near the Gulf of California in Sinaloa state, and got off the bus along a main road. He walked the last two miles into town, the U.S. source said.

Authorities are not sure which day he arrived, the source said, but it may have been as early as last weekend.

At dusk Monday, Salcido walked up to a country store in Bamoa, a village where his aunt and grandmother live about 55 miles south of Los Mochis. Teresa Leyva did not know who he was but said Thursday the unshaven man with matted hair and well-worn clothes looked menacing.

He scared her, she recalled Thursday as she sold sweets and tortillas from her one-room shop.

“He was acting nervous, like he was afraid someone would recognize him. . . . I thought he was going to rob the store. I was frightened,” she said.

Authorities picked up his trail when Sonoma County authorities received telephone calls from his sister and brother-in-law in Guasave, about 20 miles southwest of Bamoa, the U.S. source said.

At first, Sonoma County officials were not sure what to make of the phone calls. But their phone number was eventually passed to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Mazatlan, the seaside resort south of Guasave, the U.S. source said.

DEA agents made contact with Salcido’s sister and brother-in-law on Monday, three days after the killing rampage, and U.S. officials notified Mexican authorities that Salcido was back in Mexico, the source said. The Americans and Mexicans decided to work together.

“They were interested; they reacted; they supported us 100%,” the U.S. source said.

Assistant Atty. Gen. Javier Coello Trejo, head of the Mexican anti-narcotics division, ordered one of his chief commandants to join the operation. He arrived in Sinaloa Tuesday morning, the U.S. source said.

Agents stayed in contact with Salcido’s sister throughout the day Tuesday and learned that Salcido had visited family members, perhaps first in Los Mochis--where his mother lives--and later in Bamoa.

The farming area around Bamoa was good territory for hiding out, with broad fields of corn and wheat, criss-crossed by dirt roads and canals cut from the Sinaloa River. Salcido kept out of sight and may have been hiding at the home of his grandmother, Jesus Armendariz.

The impromptu task force used the sister to begin corralling Salcido. Despite her help, the arrest almost did not occur.

The U.S. source said Salcido had learned an American journalist was nearby and believed authorities were close on his tail. Patrick McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times was the first American journalist to interview Salcido’s friends and relatives, including his mother, in Los Mochis Tuesday afternoon.

“When your reporter showed up, Salcido thought you were on to him, that you’d identified that he was there. We were half a step behind (the reporter) and we were going to lose Salcido.”

Salcido’s sister helped the authorities trace his movements, telling agents late Tuesday that he was either at his mother’s house or his aunt’s house.

“She checked out both places, and when she got to the aunt’s house (near his grandmother’s home in Bamoa) she found out his uncle (Camilo Gutierrez Galvez) had just taken him to the train stop” about two miles away, the source said.

Witnesses in Bamoa told a somewhat different story Thursday. They said that at about 1 a.m. Wednesday, a squad of Mexican soldiers and federal police arrived in four or five trucks and surrounded the house of the Moreno family, across the street from Salcido’s grandmother’s house.

The witnesses said plainclothes officers awoke the Moreno family, identified themselves, entered the dwelling and began asking, “Where is Ramon?”

Luis Enrique Moreno, 18, said an officer aimed a flashlight into his mouth to determine if he had any gold fillings.

“They said Ramon had gold teeth,” Moreno said Thursday.

Convinced they had raided the wrong home, the agents crossed to the home of Salcido’s grandmother, witnesses said. The neighbors reported the police took Gutierrez, who some neighbors said is not Salcido’s uncle, into custody there and began beating him with fists and a flashlight.

The trucks than raced off to the small train depot and found Salcido about 1:30 a.m., half an hour before the next train south was due to arrive.

“Salcido was waiting for the train to Guadalajara. He was going to go get lost in the big city. If we had been there 30 minutes later, we would have missed him,” the U.S. source said.

Salcido was not armed and offered no resistance, the source said.

Salcido and Gutierrez were driven to the federal prosecutor’s office in Mazatlan, and the source said Salcido promptly admitted who he was and that he committed the crimes.

Plans to fly the pair to Mexico City late Wednesday night fell through when a Mexicana Airlines flight was canceled. It was not until Thursday afternoon that Salcido was flown to Mexico City on a different Mexicana Airlines flight. It was unclear whether Gutierrez was aboard, although authorities said he would be released from custody.

In police custody, Salcido confessed to the killings on Mexican television.

“I’m guilty. I killed them in the United States, and I expect to be tried there,” he said.

On board the flight from Mazatlan to Mexico City, Salcido chewed gum and seemed calm when he said, “No, not really,” when a reporter for San Francisco television station KRON asked him during the flight if he had any remorse for the crime spree.

When the flight landed in Mexico City, Salcido was hustled into a van and driven from the main terminal to a private plane hangar across the airfield. He then was walked to a waiting jet loaned to Sonoma County officials by “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz.

Forty-five minutes after landing in Mexico City, Salcido was on his way back to California.

The official Mexican government communique said Salcido “accepted that he was a U.S. citizen and asked to be sent to the United States to be tried for the homicides he committed.”

But U.S. sources said the transfer of custody was accomplished through informal negotiations between U.S. and Mexican officials. Although Salcido was born in Mexico and was granted permanent residence in the United States, the Mexican authorities pushed the American officials to smooth the legal process and say he was a U.S. citizen, sources said.

Sonoma County officials had brought along positive identification of Salcido, death certificates for his suspected victims, a report on his immigration status and a copy of the charges to help smooth the way, U.S. sources said.

Ultimately, a U.S. source said, the American position was that “he had the full rights of a U.S. citizen under the Constitution, was a U.S. resident married to an American, with American kids, that he had a Social Security card and a driver’s license, that he worked there openly . . . If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck. . . .”

A U.S. source said also that color photographs of the savagely mutilated victims helped the process along.

“This gets to the fiber of the Mexican family. You don’t kill your kids. . . .” the source said.

The informal “deportation” was not universally supported in the Mexican government. Some Foreign Ministry sources believed it was improper to send Salcido back to stand trial in California, in part, because Mexico has no death penalty and California law allows for capital punishment.

“I don’t see how the Mexican government can hand over a Mexican citizen to be killed, no matter how much of a criminal he is,” one Foreign Ministry source said.

Gene Tunney, district attorney in Sonoma County, where the killings occurred, has said he will seek the death penalty for Salcido. So far, Salcido faces four murder charges there in the deaths of his wife, Angela, 24; daughters, Sofia, 4, and Teresa, 1, and his boss at Grand Cru Vineyards, Tracey Toovey, 35. He faces two other charges of attempted murder in attacks on his daughter Carmina, 3, and another co-worker, Kenneth Butti, 33.

Authorities in Sonoma County said Salcido will also be charged with the slayings of his mother-in-law, Marian Louise Richards, 42, and Angela’s two sisters, Ruth, 12, and Maria, 8.

Miller reported from Mexico City, Roderick from Los Angeles. Also contributing were Times staff writers Patrick McDonnell in Sinaloa, Mexico; Dan Morain and Ronald B. Taylor in Sonoma County; H.G. Reza and Times photographer Bob Grieser in San Diego; Robert L. Jackson in Washington and Norma Kaufman in San Francisco.