Police Have No Clues, Only Questions in Stabbing Death

It has been 2 1/2 weeks since the bloodstained body of Guillermo Inocente Rivas was found sprawled beside El Segundo Boulevard, but Los Angeles police say they still have more questions than answers about his mysterious death.

* Who stabbed him to death, and why?

* Why did the soft-spoken, 57-year-old factory employee, driving his usual route to work about 4:45 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 25, pull to the curb and get out of his pickup truck just after exiting the Harbor Freeway?

* Why did his pickup, which was missing when detectives arrived at the crime scene about an hour after the attack, inexplicably turn up at the location a day later?

“We don’t have any clues,” South Bureau homicide Detective Verne King said Tuesday. “We don’t have any leads. We don’t have any witnesses.”

Co-workers at Tempo Window Vogue Inc., a window-blind plant where Rivas had worked for the last 15 years as a packer, said that, according to his daughter, he left his home in Altadena about 4 a.m. on the morning of the attack to drive to the factory in Hawthorne.

“We normally don’t work on weekends,” said John Lee, a supervisor at the plant at 3457 W. El Segundo Blvd. But this time, he said, Rivas was part of the crew helping to reorganize the plant.

“He’s a very religious man (a Seventh-day Adventist), so he didn’t come in on Saturday,” Lee said. “But he said he would come in on Sunday.”

Police say Rivas probably drove south on the Harbor Freeway, turned west, as usual, on El Segundo Boulevard and stopped in front of an apartment complex in the 700 block, in the narrow strip of Los Angeles that hugs the freeway between Compton and Gardena.

According to investigators, residents of the complex thought that they heard a man shouting something in Spanish--something that sounded like “Ayudame!” (Help me!)

But it was probably another half an hour or more before anyone noticed Rivas lying by the curb.

Police said they found him unconscious, the victim of a single knife wound. His truck, a red 1988 Chevrolet LUV model with a white camper shell, was missing.

Rivas died at a nearby hospital during surgery. Meanwhile, co-workers wondered at his absence.

“When he said he’d be here, he’d be here,” said Miguel Jacobo, 35, another supervisor at the plant. “When he didn’t show up, it surprised me.”

“He was a hard worker and a very good person,” said Lupe Ochoa, 55, an assembler.

“He was always there to help,” echoed Milagro Tario, 37, another assembler. “He was a very special person.”

On the morning after Rivas, a native of El Salvador, failed to show up for work, his daughter, Lela, went to the plant looking for her father.

“She said she seen him the morning before, when he left for work,” Jacobo said. “She said she hadn’t seen him again.”

Jacobo said no one at the plant knew then what had happened. But later in the morning, police brought word of the fatal attack. That afternoon, the homicide detectives located the missing pickup in an impound yard.