Lawyer Says Wrong Man Held in Drug Agent’s Slaying

A South Los Angeles auto mechanic arrested Friday in the 1985 kidnap-slaying of a U.S. drug agent in Mexico is the wrong man, his lawyer said in court Monday.

Defense attorney Gretchen von Helms told a U.S. magistrate judge that her client’s true name is Antonio Vazquez Conchas, not Antonio Vasquez Ochoa, one of 16 people indicted in the slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.

Outside the hearing, Von Helms said Vazquez is a permanent legal resident who is in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen, has worked for the same auto transmission shop for more than 10 years and is the father of two teenage girls, one of whom attends UC Davis.

“He’s a sweet man who seems truly befuddled by all these charges,” the defense lawyer said.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Lawrence Ng did not dispute Von Helms’ statement, but told Judge Paul Abrams, “Given the gravity of the charges, we want to make sure we have the right defendant.”

Both sides asked the judge to postpone Vazquez’s detention hearing until April 21 so federal investigators can check out his story. In the meantime, he will remain in custody at the federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles.

A spokesman for the U.S. Marshal’s Service, which arrested Vazquez on a 1992 fugitive warrant, said the agency planned to take another look at the information it used to determine it had the right man.

About two weeks ago, according to the spokesman, investigators from the marshal’s fugitive detail obtained information that led them to Howard’s Automatic Transmission on 140th Street, the shop where Vazquez worked. After two days of surveillance they spotted a suspect and took him into custody without incident.

The marshal’s service initially said that the man they arrested had been living and working in the United States illegally for the last two years and had been a member of the Guadalajara narcotics cartel. The cartel was believed responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of Camarena while he was assigned to the DEA’s office in Guadalajara.

At the time of Camarena’s slaying, Von Helms told reporters, her client was living in Sonora, Mexico, where he sold candies for pinatas.

Camarena, a 37-year-old DEA agent working undercover in Mexico, was abducted in broad daylight on Feb. 7, 1985, as he was walking to his car near the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara.

American investigators said he was driven to a drug lord’s walled compound in a Guadalajara suburb, where he was interrogated about DEA activities, tortured with burning cigarettes and beaten to death.