Police Sketch, Dogged Hunt Pay Off in Killing : Crime: A suspect is charged in a year-old South-Central L.A. murder after two investigators refuse to quit.

Month after month two detectives worked on the murder case, talking to people, running down leads, showing an artist’s rendering of the gunman to anyone who would look.

One of the local cops said it looked something like a street person named Jason Lovell Brown, but he was not sure.

Further complicating things, the only known eyewitness to the crime moved and could not be found.

But last month, another eyewitness finally came forward. Los Angeles police said that when she saw photos of Brown, she told them he was the man who shot Arrell Kegler to death.

And on Tuesday, almost a year after the shooting in South-Central Los Angeles, Brown, 27, was formally charged with murder.

“The work paid off,” Sgt. Larry Kallestad, the detectives’ supervisor at the South Bureau homicide division, said Tuesday with a contented sigh. “And one thing that helped--that composite was a dead-bang ringer for the guy.”

The detectives--Bill Cox and Jerry Manske--say the crime occurred about 2:30 a.m. last June 5, on 45th Street near Vermont Avenue. They say that when a young woman approached a man at the corner and asked him for a match, he responded by pulling a gun and robbing her of her money and jewelry.

At about the same time, the officers said, Kegler, 46, who lived in a nearby duplex, arrived home in his car and apparently attempted to intervene.

“He’s the Good Samaritan type,” Kegler’s wife, Annie, later told officers.

Annie Kegler said she was getting ready to greet her husband at the door when she heard two shots. She said she rushed to a window and heard her husband moaning.

“Baby, I’ve been shot,” she said he told her. “Don’t come out. Don’t come out. . . .”

Annie Kegler said she called paramedics, who rushed her husband, wounded in the right arm and chest, to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. He died two hours later.

After interviewing the young woman who had been robbed, a police artist drew a composite sketch of the killer.

Kallestad said an officer who patrols the area told them the picture looked a lot like Brown, but he could not be certain.

“By then, we’d lost contact with the woman who had been robbed,” Kallestad said. “We didn’t have anyone who could ID him. . . .

“Finally, in mid-April, another witness . . . a female . . . came forward and said she’d seen it, she’d seen the crime,” the sergeant said. “She was shown a series of photos, including Brown’s. As a result of her information, Brown was arrested.”

Kallestad said corroboration of the identification has since been provided by the robbery victim, whom police were able to locate after the arrest.

Brown was charged with murder and robbery in Los Angeles Superior Court. He is being held without bail in County Jail.