Brazen and Brutal : Market Patrons Were Too Shocked by Decapitated Head to Report It

Your average murderer usually keeps a low profile, obscures any clues that could tie him to the body and says little about the crime in public.

But Humberto Amaya was so proud of his crime--and so incensed that friends doubted his story--that police said he slashed off the victim’s head with a machete, tossed it into a roasting pan and displayed it next to the pastry case at his neighborhood market.

The owner of the Guatemalteca Market in the Pico-Union area said everyone who watched the 32-year-old tailor wave the head around “was too much in shock” to think of reporting it.

Detectives caught the suspected killer Monday after he allegedly dumped the head, wrapped in a plastic bag, in an alley. The bag, printed with the name of the Guatemalteca Market, led them to the store, where employees identified Amaya.

Employees of the market were still stunned Tuesday. The owner, Oscar Mansilla, said Amaya wandered into the store Sunday afternoon, bought a beer and began bragging to the butcher and a few employees that he had just killed somebody. When no one believed him, he became extremely angry, Mansilla said.

Amaya, a regular customer, promised to return in 10 minutes with proof, Mansilla said. He walked the few blocks to his apartment and returned carrying a yellow plastic bag. Then Amaya opened the bag and pulled out the metal roasting pan with the head in it, Mansilla said.

“He turned to everyone in the store and said: ‘You didn’t believe me . . . well, here it is,’ said butcher Jose Hernandez. “There was blood all over. Everyone in the store got real scared and people started rushing out the door.”

But Amaya was not satisfied, Mansilla said. He was still angry because he thought people had called him a liar.

“He pulled the head out of the bag by the hair and paraded around the store like the guy in the movie: ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’,” Mansilla said. “It was very frightening.”’

Patrons at the market crowded around Mansilla as he recounted the incident, shook their heads and muttered: “muy loco. “ But Mansilla said Amaya was not crazy. He was a “hard-working guy” who had a steady job with a garment manufacturer sewing zippers on dresses and trousers.

“He was one of the company’s best workers . . . he was very fast and made a lot of money,” Mansilla said. “But he did like to drink and I think he was drunk when he brought the head in here.”

But no one at the store called police.

Homicide detectives were not called in until Sunday night, when a group of children playing in an alley near the market found the plastic bag with the head. On Monday, Detective Carlos Brizzolara returned and told the driver of a trash truck to be on the alert for the rest of the victim’s body.

“The trash collector told me there was a trash can on his route that was so heavy he didn’t pick it up because it was over the limit,” Brizzolara said. “He took me to the trash can and inside was the body.”

Amaya will be arraigned today on murder charges. The name of the victim, a 35-year-old transient, is being withheld until his next of kin has been identified.

Amaya, who had met the victim at a neighborhood bar, invited him to his studio apartment. Police suspect that he killed the transient because he thought the man was trying to steal his stereo. After Amaya cut off the victim’s head, he wrapped the body in wire and stitched the stomach to the chest so it would fit in a trash can, police said.

Amaya had been arrested before for relatively minor offenses, said a detective who requested anonymity. But nothing in his record “resembles something like this,” said the detective, who added that when Amaya was arrested “he seemed rational.”

“We investigate a lot of brutal homicides, but this was something else,” said Detective Don Richards, a supervising detective on the case. “The gruesome nature of this case definitely sets it apart.”