Homicide Suspects Often Take Refuge South of Border

On the trail of two suspected killers, Anaheim Det. Charlie Chavez arrived in Mexico in 1985 with names, addresses and a stack of evidence to prove his case. Police in two cities politely took the paperwork and told Chavez to wait for them to make an arrest.

Eleven years later, Chavez and other Anaheim investigators are still waiting.

Chavez’s ordeal is an extreme example of a familiar frustration for Orange County police who often see their suspects evade or stall American justice. Mexico can provide the perfect refuge for those who commit the ultimate crime and flee, police say.

In the case of Chavez’s suspects, Mexican police went for months without answering the Anaheim detective’s queries. Finally, Chavez got a reply: One fugitive was believed dead in a car accident, the other had simply vanished. The Anaheim detective was skeptical.

“I just feel that they are both out there and did not get picked up,” Chavez said. “We have no way of verifying.”

Tangles of bureaucracy, loopholes in extradition treaties and corruption among Mexican police agencies are among the challenges local police say they face when their searches for killers lead south of the border.

Santa Ana police say most of their 56 fugitive murder suspects are believed to be in Mexico, a situation mirrored in other Orange County cities.

“In our city, I’d say at least half of our murder suspects go to Mexico,” said Orange Police Chief John R. Robertson. “We spend an awful lot of resources to identify them and it’s immensely difficult to get them back. Mexican authorities are not as helpful as they could be. . . . It’s extremely frustrating.”

The problem is so daunting, Robertson said, that local law enforcement agencies should consider pooling their resources to form a task force that could concentrate on extradition of violent fugitives from Mexico to face trial in the United States.

“It’s something we should look at,” Robertson said. “We should do something.”

The frustrations of local law enforcement officials--and their harsh words for Mexican counterparts--do not ring entirely true to Mexican officials such as Jess Araujo, legal counsel for the Mexican Consulate in Orange County.

“The talk of corruption, those are the kind of stereotypes that have developed over the years, and there may have been truth to them, say, a decade ago,” Araujo said. “My experience has shown me that [Mexican agencies] try to do a good job and deal in good faith. Justice must be equal on both sides. It is in everyone’s best interest for criminals to be captured.”

Araujo also said there is a perception in local Latino neighborhoods that Southern California police investigators may use the border as convenient way to explain away investigations that end without an arrest. To say the suspect is in Mexico relieves some pressure on detectives, Araujo said.

“That has always been a suspicion in the Mexican communities,” Araujo said. “In some individual cases, I’m sure there have been individuals [in American law enforcement] who do bend the rules. That happens on both sides, and it’s difficult for public relations. But it is not a common thing. The best thing is to move forward.”

The challenges facing American officials are not unique. Officials with one Mexican police agency said it is difficult for them, too, when they seek suspects hiding in the United States.

“The same thing happens here,” said Zacatecas state police officer Jaime Garcia Rodriguez. “People commit crimes here, then go to the United States and live there a few years until the arrest warrant expires.”

Zacatecas police were one of the two agencies visited more than a decade ago by Chavez, the Anaheim detective hunting for two murder suspects. Garcia had no knowledge of that specific case, but said he knew of many examples of successful extradition.

Detectives say Orange County fugitives heading south are either Mexican citizens bolting for their native soil or Americans of Mexican heritage hoping to lose themselves in the neighboring country’s cities or vast rural areas. The traffic both ways is relentless.

Immigration and Naturalization Service officials say they deport more than 2,000 criminal immigrants found each month in jails and prisons in a seven-county area that includes Orange and Los Angeles counties. As soon as the criminal immigrants finish their sentences, extradition proceedings are begun, officials said.

Fully half of those criminal immigrants are in custody on violent felonies.

“It’s not uncommon to see the same criminal aliens get sent back three or four times, and they may have crossed back and forth another three or four times before they were arrested,” said John McAllister, the INS’s deputy assistant district director for investigations.

Orange County gang investigators say many of their most dangerous suspects drift back and forth between Orange County cities and Mexico, heading south for refuge and then being drawn back by criminal profit, relationships or their old lifestyles.

Many of the Orange County fugitives are Mexican-Americans who find it difficult to forgo their American roots if their refuge is in rural Mexico, investigators said.

“They shoot somebody, they go down to their great-grandmother’s house for a while, but they realize there’s no plumbing, no electricity, the food stinks,” Anaheim gang investigator Dave Vangsness said. “They can’t hack it down there. They realize for the first time what their parents did for them coming to America.”

The lure of American life proves too great for many fugitives, even those facing the death penalty if caught and convicted.

In one case, a murder suspect in a 1979 drive-by shooting in Santa Ana turned up 12 years later in Alamogordo, N.M.--behind the wheel of car pulled over by a state trooper for a traffic infraction. The fugitive had been safely obscure in Juarez, but he risked a trip stateside to visit family, police say.

Sometimes, the risk of returning to American soil is unplanned: Early this year, another suspected Santa Ana killer was riding horseback in northern Mexico when he was thrown and suffered a severe head injury. An emergency helicopter flight to a San Diego hospital provided an extradition that law enforcement could not.

“The hospital called us and told us they had our guy,” said Capt. Dan McCoy, head of investigations for Santa Ana police. “It didn’t matter in that case. He died of his injuries. But you never know when or how these people are going to turn up. Or even if they will turn up.”

The slaying of Lilia Vianey Guevara, a 14-year-old Westminster High School sophomore, and the hunt for her suspected killers painfully illustrate the vagaries of a manhunt where a national border becomes a roadblock to justice.

The teen was shot to death on Sept. 13, 1991, as she was leaving a Tustin house party. The bullet that claimed her life was intended for her companion, who was being chased from the party by three men.

Tustin police arrested one man shortly after the killing, and he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. But the other two assailants--cousins named Al Guerrero and Robert Garcia--fled to the Mexican border city of Tijuana.

The trail ended at the border, so Tustin detectives prepared their case against Guerrero and Garcia, obtained arrest warrants, had the documents translated into Spanish, and delivered it all to Mexican authorities.

The case sat around for four years, until FBI agents working out of San Diego learned where the men were hiding. The Mexican police were notified, and within hours both Garcia and Guerrero were in Mexican custody.

Under the treaty governing extradition between the two countries, Garcia, a Mexican citizen, would be tried in Mexico, while Guerrero, a U.S. citizen, would be sent back to face trial in the United States.

It didn’t happen that way.

When Tustin Det. Tom Tarpley went to the border to take custody of Guerrero, he was stunned to learn that Mexican immigration authorities had released the murder suspect. “I was not happy--that is an understatement,” Tarpley said. “We were never told exactly what happened.”

A few months later, after Tarpley brought several witnesses to Mexico to testify against Garcia, he, too, was released. “They told us that they lost the English version of one of the documents,” Tarpley said. “I was pretty angry.”

The tale took another bizarre twist in January, when the FBI got a phone call from Mexican authorities. They had just arrested Guerrero and were ready to turn him over. His trial is now underway in Orange County Superior Court--more than five years after Lilia Guevara’s death.

“Nobody ever explained to me what happened there,” Tarpley said, “I was just happy we were finally getting him. . . . I dread these kinds of cases. Mexico has its own set of rules. And they always, always have a lot of questions.”

Are there solutions? While Orange Police Chief Robertson and others talk about changing policies and tactics, some local cops shrug their shoulders and say the proximity of the border is an unavoidable part of doing business in the Southland.

“It has been a part of Southern California law enforcement for a long, long time,” Fullerton Police Sgt. Dave Stanko said. “And it’s not going to change.”