2 Families Entwined in Slain Girl’s Saga

Their lives were once so intertwined that Melinda “Mindy” Carmody and Juan Manuel Lopez Hernandez seemed to be married in all but name.

She was 14, still smarting from her parents’ divorce and cultivating a cavalier attitude to mask it. He was a swaggering 21-year-old, a part-time worker in a pizza parlor and full-time member of the Parthenia Street gang.

In no time at all, it seemed, she moved from his arms to his extended family’s crowded Northridge apartment, ditching her mother’s condominium in Panorama City for the embrace of Juan’s gregarious parents and siblings. With enough makeup applied to her fair skin and green eyes, Mindy even began resembling the Latina girls of her new neighborhood.

“To us she was like another sister,” said Lopez’s 15-year-old sister, Patricia, about Mindy’s 8-month stay with her family. “We used to go to parties and church together.”

Two families tried to protect and comfort Mindy--Lopez’s and her own--each in its own way. Yet both failed, and today both are in mourning. Mindy is dead at the age of 16, shot in the back April 12 around the corner from the Lopez household. And two Lopez brothers are in jail--Juan facing charges that he kidnapped Mindy after she broke up with him, while 17-year-old Ricardo stands accused of killing the girl after she testified against his brother.

Though the Lopez family defends the brothers’ innocence and says Mindy may have been a victim of her own gang connections, law-enforcement authorities are continuing to investigate the possibility that Ricardo Lopez acted on behalf of his obsessed older brother in a tragically youthful case of domestic violence.

“She testified against the guy’s brother. You draw your own conclusions,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Taklender.

Grieving relatives in both families say the only conclusions they can draw are that Mindy was a lost girl in search of belonging, and Lopez was more than eager to offer her a home.

“She was naive, and that’s what got her killed,” said Mindy’s grandmother, Edna Steffen.

Mutual friends from Parthenia Street introduced them in January 1995. By then, Mindy’s parents had been divorced several years, and she had bounced between her father’s home in Ventura and her mother’s in the San Fernando Valley.

She had also begun flirting with drugs, alcohol and gangs, according to old friends, and was spending more time on Parthenia Street, near the Lopez home. She attended Granada Hills High School during the fall of 1994, but only sporadically, friends and a school guidance counselor said.

Mindy’s boyfriend from Granada Hills High, Michael Doig, said she left him “for a cooler crowd,” one that wore heavier makeup and baggier clothes. She also stopped signing her letters “Lil’ Green Eyes” and participating in Job’s Daughters, a Masonic youth group for girls that encourages community work.

“I think her relatives kinda knew what was going on with Mindy,” said Doig, now 18. “But maybe they thought it was just a phase.”

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Mindy’s parents declined to be interviewed for this article, but her mother did make efforts to keep her out of school and away from bad influences with a home-study program, according to Steffen. Yet the attraction to Lopez had grown too strong, and she was fast becoming a fixture on Parthenia Street, where one neighbor recalled frequently seeing her “kicking back and drinking with the cholos.”

Rather than returning to her mother’s home, Mindy began sleeping in the car of one of Lopez’s friends, according to his mother, Rosario Lopez. Soon, he persuaded her to let the girl move into the family’s crowded apartment, where she shared her boyfriend’s bedroom. The two became inseparable.

“They were always together, laughing about unimportant things,” said Lopez’s 19-year-old sister, Lilia.

To the Lopez family, the relationship seemed only to help the pair. Mindy stopped drinking and using drugs, Rosario Lopez said. She headed to Mass instead of street corners, and started wearing dresses instead of baggy pants. Lopez also cut back on his drinking, his mother said, and seemed to spend less time with the gang. Every few weeks, Mindy’s mother picked her up for visits, Rosario Lopez said.

Then last November, the couple went to Arizona to stay for a while with Mindy’s aunt, Debbie Caulfield. They returned a month later, partly because Lopez couldn’t find a job, Rosario Lopez said. Once they came back, Mindy moved back to her mother’s place and Lopez to his.

It was then that her mother prohibited Mindy from seeing Lopez, Rosario Lopez said. For four agonizing months between December and March, she said, her heartbroken son called Mindy daily but her mother constantly said the girl wasn’t home.

“Juan would drink and cry all the time,” said Lilia, his sister. “He was always sad.”

They resorted to writing letters and even planned to move out of California together, Lilia said, adding that Mexico seemed a good refuge from those who were trying to break them up. The Lopez family says that is how he ended up in jail--in their eyes, unjustly so.

On March 13, according to police reports and Mindy’s grandmother, Lopez went to Mindy’s home while her mother was gone. He burst into the condominium, roughed the girl up and forced her into his car at knifepoint. Testifying later in a preliminary hearing in Van Nuys Municipal Court, Mindy tearfully told a judge that she was frightened for her life during the incident.

“He said if he can’t have me, no one can,” she said during the March 28 hearing.

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Rosario Lopez said she saw the couple that day, when Lopez brought Mindy back to his family’s apartment, and that she questioned the girl about whether it was her choice to go along. She said she warned the couple about fleeing, but Mindy said she was going voluntarily.

“You’re going to have problems,” she said she told them. “The authorities are going to follow you to Mexico.”

From Northridge, Lopez took Mindy to the El Monte home of an aunt who was supposed to drive the couple to Tijuana. Instead, she turned them down. The woman cleaned up Mindy’s minor injuries and drove the girl back to her mother’s home, according to members of both families.

The same night, Steffen said, the distraught girl went to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division to file a complaint against Lopez and seek a restraining order.

Even then, Steffen said, Lopez persisted, repeatedly phoning and demanding to talk to Mindy.

Three days after the alleged kidnapping, officers arrested him prowling near Mindy’s mother’s home. He remains in custody in lieu of $130,000 bail on charges of assault, kidnapping and burglary. No trial date has been set because of the continuing investigation of Mindy’s slaying.

The Lopez family said they don’t believe Mindy’s claims about the assault. “Mindy loved Juan,” Rosario Lopez said. “She wasn’t capable of sending him to jail.”

The family also dismisses the police evidence against Ricardo Lopez--including the alleged murder weapon found in the Lopez home and a confession they believe was extracted under pressure.

“My brother said he had did it, but we don’t believe he did,” Lilia Lopez said.

Whoever did may have lured Mindy to her old haunt, law-enforcement authorities say. Two weeks and one day after she testified, with Juan in jail, she applied her trademark batch of makeup for the last time.

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On a hazy Friday night, two teenage girlfriends picked her up at about 7:30 from the Panorama City condo, police and her grandmother said. They were supposed to head to a party, according to Steffen, but ended up in the 18000 block of Schoenborn Street, near Lindley Avenue and Roscoe Boulevard.

One witness said as the van pulled up, across the street from Northridge Middle School, someone ran around the corner and told the Lopez family that Mindy was in the area.

Though accounts of exactly what occurred next differ, Steffen said the girl was shoved out of the van and into the street, where a small crowd gathered around her. As she turned to run from the scene, she was shot four times in the back. Neighbors heard the gunshots and the sound of people running.

They found the street empty by the time they ventured outside, except for Mindy lying face down near the curb. She was moaning, and her hands were trembling and grasping at the blood-soaked sides of her blouse. The lost girl in search of a family lay dying alone.