Some Crime Witnesses Pay High Price for Civic Duty : Violence: Agreeing to testify can bring threats, even death. L.A. gangs are notorious for intimidation tactics.

Maria Gutierrez lost her life for doing her civic duty.

She saw the killing crystal clear, having taken cover in a carport from the gunfire that erupted in the tattered row of one-story apartments in southwest Los Angeles where she lived. The cops booked Alex Hernandez, a member of the 18th Street gang, on charges of murder in the death of his rival from Locos 13, a neighborhood kid everyone called “Dreamer.”

The detectives asked Gutierrez to testify, but she did not want to get involved. “I can’t be snitching,” she told them. But they kept pressing her, playing on the 43-year-old immigrant woman’s sympathy for the dead boy, whom she liked. Do it for Dreamer, they implored, and she did--agreeing to be the key witness for the prosecution.

Last November--with jury selection in the trial just getting under way--Gutierrez was murdered. Her bullet-torn body was found on 18th Street gang turf, a few yards from where Dreamer had been shot down. “Multiple gunshot wounds to the head and neck,” the coroner’s report said. Her killer has not been found, but Hernandez was convicted on the strength of her testimony at a preliminary hearing.

“She did the right thing by testifying,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Dick Simmons, who handled the Hernandez case. “But it probably cost her her life.”

What happened to Maria Gutierrez is a nasty little secret shared by police and prosecutors but often shielded from the public: witness intimidation. It is a problem that surfaces in many criminal prosecutions, but is especially severe in Los Angeles County, where gang-related crimes account for an increasing chunk of the criminal court caseload.

Although no one tracks statistics on how often witnesses are threatened or killed, local law enforcement authorities say gangs are notorious for intimidating witnesses--a fact that is reflected in the county’s witness protection program. Over the past two years, taxpayers financed the relocation of nearly 250 families and individuals who were in danger because they were witnesses or victims of crime. About 75% of those moves stemmed from intimidation by gang members, according to Ronald Maus, assistant chief of the district attorney’s Bureau of Investigation and the program’s administrator.

Because police and prosecutors rely on the help of the public in solving crimes, witness intimidation--and particularly witness murder--is not their favorite topic of conversation. “Are you kidding?” asked one veteran LAPD detective in refusing to be interviewed. “If we put out that our witnesses are getting killed, nobody will cooperate with us.”

Nonetheless, intimidation does occur, and it can take many forms.

It can be subtle--a menacing stare across a courtroom, a slow drive past the home of someone who is about to testify. A Compton woman recounts how neighborhood youths parked outside her front door and pointed toward her house after she served as a witness in the murder trial of one of their gang brothers. She was so rattled she left her longtime home for an apartment in another city. “These gangbangers,” she said nervously. “They know who is who.”

Overt threats are not uncommon--a verbal assault in a school corridor, a frightening letter left on the doorstep. A Los Angeles woman planned to testify against members of an El Salvadoran gang who broke into her apartment and poured scalding water over her infant son after she reported their drug-dealing activities to police. On the day she was to take the witness stand, a note was tacked to her apartment door. It was a rough cut-and-paste job, words and letters clipped from newspaper pages. “This is a warning,” the message read. “Do not go to court.”

At times, the badgering can be terrifying--a nighttime hail of bullets through the living room window. A sheriff’s sergeant recalls how a Lynwood family fled to their native Mexico to avoid testifying after gang members repeatedly fired gunshots into their home. “They literally abandoned their house,” the sergeant said, “for fear they would be killed.”

And, on rare occasions, witness intimidation equals witness execution.

Just this month, a 14-year-old Pomona youth who bravely testified against two gang members suspected of murder was lured into an alley several blocks from his home and gunned down. Eduardo Samaniego was a clean-cut Little Leaguer who had made his parents proud by taking the witness stand during a preliminary hearing in February. Although there were more than a dozen witnesses to the gang shooting, only Eduardo and two others testified.

Authorities do not say Eduardo was murdered in retaliation for his testimony; they say they know of no motive for his killing. But Eduardo had no known enemies and was not mixed up in gangs, and his death on Aug. 17 had eerie timing--it occurred just days before the murder trial was to begin. Eduardo’s parents are convinced that gang members killed their son to keep him from talking in court a second time.

“I felt it was right for him to testify,” the boy’s mother, Maria Elena Samaniego, said shortly after her son was killed. “But I didn’t realize he was going to be in any danger.”

Kathryn Giles also did what she believed was right, and paid the ultimate price.

The 50-year-old South-Central Los Angeles woman was walking to her job as a city park custodian one June morning in 1990 when she crossed paths with a man she knew from the nearby Avalon Gardens housing project. He asked her to pick up a package at an Exxon station around the corner. She refused at first, but he offered to pay her a small fee, and so she changed her mind.

The package, it turned out, was ransom money for a kidnaping. When Giles showed up to retrieve it, she was greeted by a phalanx of police. They arrested her, and she led them to the man who had sent her there: Anthony Beck, whom authorities say belonged to the Avalon Gangster Crips.

Beck was charged with kidnaping and Giles became a witness. Before long, she was receiving threats. Two weeks later, she was dead, blown away at a Baldwin Hills Arco station by a gunman who pushed her out of a car and pumped her full of bullets at point-blank range. Without her crucial testimony, the district attorney’s office was forced to drop its case against Beck.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Terri Schwartz, who would have prosecuted Beck, has no doubt that Giles was killed to prevent her from taking the witness stand.

“She was in fear,” Schwartz said. “She was put up by the gang members to pick up the ransom money. That was her sole involvement in the case. There was no reason for her death, other than that. When her body was discovered, it was just a well-known fact that this was a gang killing to keep her from testifying.”

Giles’ mother, 76-year-old Corinne Wheaton, still holds out a slim hope that her daughter’s killers will be found. She keeps a photograph of Kathryn hanging on a wood-paneled wall over the television set in her living room, alongside framed pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Talking about the death moves her to take the photograph off the wall.

“It hurts,” she says sadly, running her fingers over the edges of the frame. “Cuts like a knife. She lost her life for nothing. But she’s safe and free now, and all the wickedness in the world can’t do any harm to her. They will pay in the ultimate end--God says so. They will reap what they sow.”

Within law enforcement, there is a kind of moral dance that officers and prosecutors often conduct with themselves over whether to call certain witnesses. On the one hand, authorities want to win cases. On the other hand, is obtaining a criminal conviction worth putting a witness in danger?

Lionel Robert, a recently retired detective for the Los Angeles Police Department, danced that dance hundreds of times over the course of his 27-year career. Once, he refused to give a prosecutor the name of a key witness to the murder of a teen-age girl. The deputy district attorney was furious, but Robert said he would rather lose the case than put the witness in harm’s way.

“The victim was a 16-year-old girl,” the veteran detective said. “It’s unfortunate that she got caught in the way of a bullet. But I would have had another victim on my hands if I revealed this witness’s name.”

Although some witnesses are eligible for help from the county’s 12-year-old witness protection program, the money available for relocation is scarce and sometimes it does not get to those who need it. Last year, the county paid $190,000 to relocate witnesses, at an average cost of $1,551 per move. That is barely enough to provide a family with money to pay the first and last month’s rent on a new apartment, said Maus, the program administrator.

“We do not go full bore on it,” he said. “We don’t have the money. All we are doing is a short-term thing to take them out of immediate danger, to move them to a safe location where they can get their lives back in order and fend for themselves after two or three months. It’s just a short-term solution; we’re not set up for long-term solutions.”

Who gets protection often depends on the relationship between witnesses and the investigating officer on a given case. It is up to local authorities to determine if a witness is eligible for the program and, if so, to apply with the district attorney’s office for the funds. Many witnesses do not even know the program exists.

Often, witnesses resist efforts to move them; they may be reluctant to leave their families and their homes. Maria Gutierrez, who was killed for her testimony in the “Dreamer” case, rebuffed suggestions from the police that she leave her neighborhood. So did Kathryn Giles; she did not want to leave her elderly mother.

Sometimes, witness protection comes too little too late.

Fifteen-year-old Renee Johnson was murdered by a gunman who burst into her family’s Lennox apartment in the middle of the night and sprayed it with bullets. Benny (Ben-dog) Bellfield had been threatening the Johnson family ever since Renee began cooperating with police in the investigation of a July, 1989, murder committed by a member of the 120 Raymond Crips, Bellfield’s gang.

“He kept saying whenever he found out who snitched on him, he was gonna smoke ‘em,” said Deborah Johnson, Renee’s aunt. “I told him it wasn’t no snitch up in here.”

But nobody in the Johnson family reported the threats to authorities--in part because they thought they could take care of themselves, in part because they did not trust the police. After Renee was murdered, her mother, aunt, grandmother and cousins entered the witness protection program and moved to another county. Last year, they traveled under armed guard to testify against Bellfield and his gang brother, who are now serving life prison sentences in the death of the teen-ager.

If witness protection came late for the Johnson family, it never came at all for Eduardo Samaniego, the Pomona Little Leaguer who was killed this month. The boy’s father complains that Pomona police never offered the family any assistance--even after he expressed fears that his son would be placing himself in danger by testifying.

Police will not talk about the case, saying it is under investigation. But Ricardo Samaniego insists that authorities assured him that Eduardo would be safe.

“The officer, he gave me some kind of confidence--’Don’t worry about Eduardo, the problem is between the gangs, not with Eduardo,’ ” Samaniego said. “They never explain to me that Eduardo is going to be in front of a criminal, testifying face to face. . . . I put all my faith in the police, really, and that was my tremendous mistake.”