Woman’s Killer Gets 34-Year Prison Term

A Los Angeles gang member convicted of fatally beating a Colombian woman with a baseball bat was sentenced Friday to 34 years to life in prison for her murder and other crimes.

Carlos Rodolfo Lovos, 23, with his hands folded in his lap, showed no emotion as Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bert Glennon read the sentence.

“The defendant’s acts constitute a wanton, willful act of violence that was unprovoked and directed at total strangers,” Glennon said, also noting that Lovos had engaged in “a pattern of violent conduct.”

Carmen Leon, 32, was sitting with three men at a bus stop at Pico Boulevard and Albany Street on Sept. 2, 1988, when they were approached by Lovos and another gang member, Martin Avila.

Witnesses testified that Lovos, wielding an aluminum bat, banged it on the bench and ordered the group to leave. The three men fled.

Dressed in high heels and a skirt, Leon ran across a busy intersection with Lovos chasing her. Leon slipped and fell in an alley only four doors from her apartment. Lovos caught up with her there, witnesses said, and began beating her with the bat and kicking her with his steel-toed boots.

One witness, who had also been at the bus stop, testified that he heard something that “sounded like a bat smashing a watermelon.”

Later that evening, Lovos returned to his neighborhood bragging of the crime, witnesses said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carla Arragana, who prosecuted the case, called Leon’s murder “vicious, callous and premeditated.”

Leon had lived in the United States for five years. Friends said she worked as a housekeeper and was saving to bring her teen-age son here.

“She didn’t have a car,” Arragana said. “She had to take a bus to get around.”

Lovos also was convicted of conspiracy stemming from the would-be assault on the three men who were waiting for the bus and of a count of assault with a deadly weapon with great bodily injury in connection with another unrelated incident.

Shortly before Leon’s murder, Lovos and other gang members had been driving on the Hollywood Freeway when they pulled up alongside Roberto Flores Ruiz and his girlfriend. The gang members chased the couple off the freeway and forced them into an alley. Witnesses said Lovos got out and struck his baseball bat on Ruiz’s car, breaking the driver’s-side window. Ruiz was beaten, but managed to escape with his girlfriend, who was not injured.

Later that evening, according to court testimony, Lovos drove past the bus stop where Leon and the others sat and said to the others in the car: “Let’s go beat them up.”

Avila was a key prosecution witness in Lovos’ trial. He is awaiting sentencing on lesser charges.