Slaying Suspects Share a Past Marred by Crime

Like the crimes they are accused of committing, the two young men arrested in the killing of a pair of college students from Japan are in many ways typical of Southern California’s meanest streets.

Raymond Oscar Butler, 18, and Alberto Vasquez Reygoza, 20, have previously been arrested and served jail time--Butler for burglary and Reygoza for possessing an illegal weapon. Police say both are gang members. Both come from a tough, low-income San Pedro neighborhood, a place where, for some, violent crime has become a way of life.

In fact, a few days after Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura were shot to death in the parking lot of a San Pedro supermarket and their car was stripped of its stereo, Butler offered a 16-year-old friend some harsh advice:

“He said, ‘You can’t get a car with a lot of sound, cause you’ll get jacked like those guys at Ralphs,’ ” David Schott said Thursday.

Schott said that when Butler got out of jail recently, he asked him: “ ‘You going to be good this time?’ He says, ‘For as long as I can.’ ”

After shadowing the suspects for two days while carefully assembling the evidence against them, Los Angeles police arrested Butler and Reygoza in San Pedro on Wednesday night and booked them on suspicion of robbing and killing Ito and Matsuura last week.

The arrests were announced by Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams shortly before 11 p.m. Wednesday, in time for broadcast on evening news programs in Japan, where the case has received considerable publicity and has revived Japanese concerns about the safety of Japanese visitors in Los Angeles.

Ito and Matsuura were 19 years old and students at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, an upscale community on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The victims’ fathers, who came to Los Angeles after their sons were slain, welcomed the chief’s announcement.

Shuji Matsuura called it “the news we have been waiting for.” He said he understood that it probably will take months to complete the prosecution of the suspects, “which will be in your hands.”

“We will quietly wait for your decision,” he said.

Butler and Reygoza were being held without bail Thursday. The district attorney’s office said the two men will be arraigned this afternoon in Long Beach Municipal Court.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Janet Moore, who handled the Reginald O. Denny beating trial, has been assigned to prosecute the case. Officials said the suspects will probably be charged with robbery and murder under special circumstances, which could result in the death penalty.

Butler and Reygoza grew up a few blocks from each other in a gritty San Pedro neighborhood beside Los Angeles Harbor, with the lush hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the distance.

Both were high school dropouts and served time in Los Angeles County Jail shortly after turning 18.

Friends and neighbors expressed more resignation than surprise Thursday at the arrests of the pair.

The two young men, they said, had known each other for some time and were associated with street gangs around the 479-unit Rancho San Pedro public housing project.

Because Reygoza, nicknamed “Chato,” was known as a gang member, his arrest did not come as a shock to Rancho San Pedro resident Lorenzo Guerra, 27, who said he served time in Los Angeles County Jail with Reygoza last year.

But “as a person, I’m surprised (if) he did it,” Guerra said. He said Reygoza never seemed like a killer.

Since his parents moved to Long Beach a couple of years ago, Reygoza had lived on and off in the modest stucco house of Leona Bland, 36, a stevedore whose children were friends of the beefy suspect.

“He told me a story about how police pulled him over once and said they were going to arrest him and he said, ‘Go ahead, I’m homeless. At least then I’d have a home,’ ” Bland said. “That’s when we started helping him. It made us very sad.”

Bland said Reygoza was a dependable youth who worked for several summers as an aide at the local boys club.

But at 18, Reygoza, who had dropped out of high school, was arrested on the weapons violation. After pleading no contest, he was sentenced to 180 days in jail and ordered to undergo psychological counseling and job training. In January, he was arrested for violating the terms of his probation and ordered to spend 90 days in County Jail, according to court documents.

Bland said that after serving the initial sentence, Reygoza seemed to harden and began hanging out more frequently with gang associates. “It just started getting heavy,” Bland said. “Tattoos, everything. He got into it.”

Bland said she recently tried to help Reygoza get a job in a low-income youth employment program, but he was turned away because he had dressed in gang-style apparel--a black T-shirt and black pants.

Several people who knew Reygoza expressed anger that the isolated shootings of the Japanese students have attracted worldwide attention at the same time that homicides at the housing project almost never get media coverage.

“If it had happened here to two Mexicans, they wouldn’t have made no big deal--it would just be two less Mexicans to worry about,” said Jesus Cazares, 14. “They don’t care about us, why should we care about anyone else?”

Butler, the second of three sons in his family, was arrested on charges of first-degree residential burglary less than a month after he became an adult last summer.

Pleading no contest, he was sentenced in September to a year in County Jail. With 97 days credit for time served after his arrest, and additional credits while in jail, Butler was free within months.

Friends and neighbors said Butler was a young man of contradictions who occasionally exhibited a warm heart to youngsters in the housing project and at other times acted like a bully.

“He’d trade Nintendo games with the kids or buy them ice cream,” Schott said. “But sometimes he’d do things that didn’t make sense, like buy a soda and after two sips, throw it on the ground.”

“Everyone has a good side and everyone has a bad side,” said a neighbor who asked to remain anonymous. “With him, the bad side showed the most. Sometimes he used to beat up people around here.”

Butler graduated from Dana Junior High School in 1991 but eventually dropped out of San Pedro High School. He rarely worked, Schott and other friends said, but he did once have a summer job cleaning jail cells at a nearby LAPD station.

Schott said that a day or two after the shootings, he saw Butler outside his parent’s cinder-block apartment and told him that he was about to turn 16 and was looking forward to buying a car. It was at that point, Schott said, that Butler made the comment about the crime involving Ito and Matsuura.

Ito and Matsuura were shot in the head at close range about 11 p.m. March 25 as they got out of their car in the parking lot of the Ralphs supermarket at Capitol Drive and Western Avenue, detectives said. Williams said the suspects intended to rob the students and took their car purely on impulse.

Declared brain-dead soon after the attack, Ito and Matsuura were taken off life-support systems at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and pronounced dead Sunday night. Lt. John Dunkin, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, said that the murders initially looked as if they would be difficult to solve.

“The suspects were outstanding, the victims’ vehicle was gone, there weren’t a lot of witnesses around,” Dunkin said. “There were a lot of things we needed to resolve immediately if we hoped to solve this case.”

An investigative team was assembled, starting with veteran homicide detectives.

“When Monday rolled around, and we started to get an idea who we were looking for, we pulled in people who are involved in gang investigations in that part of the city,” Dunkin said, and eventually, as many as 30 officers were involved in the case.

Dunkin emphasized that the resources devoted to the investigation were typical for a “difficult-to-solve homicide,” and not a response to any political or public influence.

“It doesn’t take outside pressure to get us to do our job,” he said.

Police said there was an outpouring of tips from witnesses, some of them from the area where the shooting took place and others who know the suspects.

Although police would not be specific about who supplied the information, they said some of the witnesses saw the incident, while others had heard that the two suspects were involved in a robbery and car theft that evening.

Detectives said evidence from the car also tied Butler and Reygoza to the killings, but officers declined to describe the evidence.

By midafternoon Wednesday, Dunkin said, detectives had begun to close in on the suspects. He said that as search warrants were served in the South Bay, detectives went after Butler and Reygoza with arrest warrants. One of them was arrested about 7 p.m., and the other was taken into custody about half an hour later. Then came the time-consuming work of booking the two suspects and calling the victims’ families overseas.

By the time Williams announced the arrests to a room full of reporters, it was 11 p.m. Williams declined to say Thursday whether his officers have found the gun used in the slayings.

A police source said a videotape from an automated teller machine in the parking lot was not instrumental in locating the suspects.

Times correspondent Emily Adams and staff writers Shawn Hubler and Jim Newton contributed to this story.