Building Tenants May Have Killed Family, Police Say

Manuel Barrera keeps a neat building. His handiwork can be seen in the well-manicured shrubs and the orderly lobby of the Koreatown apartment building where he works as manager.

Now, three members of Barrera’s family are dead, found gagged, bound and stabbed in their apartment Sunday evening. And the names of their killer or killers might be on one of the lobby mailboxes that Barrera keeps in good condition.

Returning home after a day of moonlighting at a second job, Barrera found the bodies of his wife, Marcelina, 46, their 22-year-old son, Kenny, and Marcelina’s brother, 29-year-old Cesar Nova. Police are exploring several possible motives in the triple killings.

The building manager and his family had just collected thousands of dollars in rent from tenants in the 38-unit building, much of it paid in cash, authorities said. Police also say Barrera, who is not a suspect, was the target of recent threats from tenants he was trying to evict.

“He was concerned about his welfare because his life has been threatened,” said Lt. Dan Hills, of the LAPD’s Rampart Division.

Whoever the killers are, they may have known the victims because there was no sign of forced entry into the apartment and neighbors say they heard nothing unusual, police said Monday. Personal property and several thousand dollars were taken from the apartment.

“It was the first of the month and several people may have been coming to the door, saying ‘I’m here with the rent,’ ” Hills said.

Police say they are exploring a political connection to the killings because Barrera is a Guatemalan immigrant who is said to be active in the political movements of his native country. Family members discounted such a connection.

Guatemalan immigrants from the eastern province of Zacapa, Barrera and his family arrived in Los Angeles a decade ago, family members said. He received political asylum in this country, although family members said they did not know--and would not discuss--what his political activities were in Guatemala.

“That was all 15 years ago,” said Jairo Nora, 26, Marcelina Barrera’s cousin, one of half a dozen family members who gathered at the apartment in the hours after the killings. “That’s all forgotten now.”

Police said they did not know the exact nature of Barrera’s political activity. Hills said Barrera is cooperating with police and has been counseled by officials from the Guatemalan Consulate. Barrera is staying with consulate personnel.

“We are not considering him a suspect,” Hills said. “He’s been very helpful. Everyone has depicted him and his family as very nice, credible people.”

The building where Barrera has worked and lived with his family for several years is home to a multiethnic mix of residents. On Monday, tenants described the building manager as a hard worker who treated longtime residents with respect and never failed to fix a problem in their apartments.

“He’s always working,” tenant Gladys Chavez said in Spanish. “In the morning, when we wake up, we see him watering [the shrubs] and fixing the doors. The manager was a good person. And his wife and son were the same.”

Chavez lives across the hallway from Apartment 102, the home of the manager and his family. The pink door to Barrera’s apartment was still covered with black fingerprint dust Monday morning. A sign listed the manager’s hours, including 10 to 3 on Sunday.

On the morning of the killings, Barrera left early for his other job at Universal Studios. That night, after spending most of the day away from the apartment house, Chavez said, she was startled by a loud banging at her apartment door sometime after 6:30 p.m. It was Barrera, pounding on her door with both hands.

“He said, ‘Call the police! Call the police!’ I said, ‘What happened?’ Then I looked inside and I saw his son lying there” on the living room rug, Chavez said.

Police said two bodies were found in the living room and the third in a bedroom. Detectives recovered “a substantial amount of physical evidence” from the scene.