Police Efforts Pay Off With Arrest in ’81 Death

The year was 1981 and Chung Sang Yoon had just closed up his small South-Central Los Angeles market for the night. As he was climbing into his car, a man with a gun suddenly appeared out of the darkness and killed him.

It was one of those anonymous street slayings that usually does not get much attention from the public, the press or the police. It was the kind of killing that if not solved in the first month or two usually never gets solved, and the data chronicling the case ends up in a royal blue binder collecting dust in a homicide bureau.

But because of a melange of new technology and old-fashioned police work, the Yoon case has proved to be an exception.

*

On Thursday, 16 years after the slaying, the LAPD announced that the suspected killer was arrested in New York and soon will be brought back to Los Angeles.

“A piece of my heart was gone after the murder,” said Jenny Yoon, 21, who was 5 years old when her father was killed. “But I always kept my faith that justice would be done. Now that the man has been caught, it gives me and my family some measure of security . . . some measure of peace.”

The case was reopened when Dets. Lillian Johnson and Vic Pietrantoni of the Robbery-Homicide Division began looking into some of the bureau’s unsolved murders.

*

“The Yoon case caught my eye right away because it was the oldest one on the shelf,” Johnson said. “And compared to most unsolved cases, this one had a real advantage.”

The advantage, Johnson discovered, was that a suspect had been identified by the detectives who had investigated the case in 1981. The suspect, Benito Gutierrez, had a business next door to Yoon, and the two men were involved in an ongoing business dispute, Johnson said. There were several witnesses to the shooting and the district attorney put out a warrant for Gutierrez’s arrest.

But after the killing, Gutierrez left his wife and children and fled to Mexico. The original detectives on the case could not find him, and the case eventually landed on the unsolved shelf.

About three months ago, the case caught Johnson’s eye and she and her partner, once again, attempted to locate Gutierrez. They re-interviewed witnesses. They talked to Gutierrez’s former neighbors. They returned to the site of the murder and talked to residents. And they employed new technology--which Johnson would not identify--in their search.

*

They picked up a few leads, Johnson said, and eventually found Gutierrez in Middletown, N.Y. He was living with his wife and children and working in an auto body shop. Law enforcement officers in the area arrested him July 8, and the two LAPD detectives will be bringing him back to Los Angeles.

Youn Yoon sold the market after her husband was killed and worked as a nurse to support her two children. She had not talked to police about the case in more than a decade. Then, two weeks ago, Johnson called her.

“Right away,” Johnson said, “she asked me, ‘Did you catch him?’ ”

“My heart fell because I had to say no. Then this morning I talked to her again and told her: ‘Well, we finally got him.’ She began crying and saying, ‘Thank you,’ over and over. . . . This has turned out to be one of the most satisfying cases of my career.”