Diplomacy, Detective Work Pay Off for a Deputy’s Family

Teri March was sitting at her kitchen table in Santa Clarita Valley sharing a lunch with a friend Thursday when the call came out of the blue.

The voice on the other end was a familiar one: Det. Mark Lillienfeld, one of the investigators who for four years had been probing the fatal shooting of her husband, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy David March.

“We’ve caught him,” he told her.

March for a second wondered if it was a dream as she sat near a photo album packed with images of her husband. She had to pinch herself.

It was about 12:30 p.m., just 10 minutes after Jorge “Armando” Arroyo Garcia walked out of his uncle’s ranch in Tonala, a suburb of Guadalajara, and into the arms of Mexican police and U.S. marshals who had been tracking him for weeks.

Garcia’s arrest was praised Friday at news conferences by Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, Sheriff Lee Baca and Mexico’s Consul General Ruben Beltran as an example of cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities in the effort to bring to justice fugitives who flee to Mexico after committing crimes in the U.S.

Garcia is accused of attacking March during a traffic stop April 29, 2002, when the deputy pulled over his black Nissan Maxima on Live Oak Avenue near Peck Road in an unincorporated area near Irwindale.

Seconds after he entered the car plate on his cruiser’s computer, March was shot multiple times. Garcia was wanted for two attempted murders at the time and had been formally deported twice before.

Teri March was at work that day. The Sheriff’s Department airlifted her to Pasadena Huntington Memorial Hospital, where her husband was declared dead.

She felt like curling up in “a fetal position,” she recalled in an interview Friday. She found solace in God and her husband’s accomplishments, including a letter from a man he had arrested, telling her it had turned his life around.

But that pride in her husband and anger over the fact that Garcia was at large somewhere in Mexico boiled inside.

“I’ve laid in my bed thinking about how Armando Garcia lives his life free and how he just picked the most valuable, precious man out of all of our lives.”

This anger turned her into an activist.

A medical technician, she made six trips to Washington to lobby for changes to the Mexico-U.S. extradition system, once appearing at a congressional hearing. She urged the federal government to pressure Mexican officials to return accused killers who fled south of the border.

President Bush hugged her and promised that the government “would get this guy.”

She also became an outspoken voice for cops’ widows, even starring in a radio advertisement opposing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over pensions.

The ad angered her in-laws, who did an ad supporting the governor.

By last fall, she had begun to believe that a trial in Mexico for Garcia might be the only way to get justice. She was becoming skeptical that he would ever be returned to the United States.

“I held out hope, but it was fading,” March said. “Pride in Dave kept me going.” But as every day passed, it seemed less possible, she said.

But Cooley reassured her, saying he believed they would eventually find Garcia and put him on trial in Los Angeles.

Their efforts got a boost in November, when Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that the government could extradite suspects to the United States as long as they would not face the death penalty.

She was once again before the cameras Friday, talking about the arrest.

She said she was eager for Garcia to face trial, even though prosecutors can seek only life in prison rather than the death penalty.

“I’ve probably spent four years imagining what today would feel like,” she said. “It’s a pretty emotional day.”

A few feet away stood David March’s parents, John and Barbara March, who praised the detectives, prosecutors and U.S. marshals for their efforts.

“This is a very special day for our family,” Barbara March told reporters.

At one point Friday, Teri March wrapped her arms around the photo of husband, then noted that an investigator from the district attorney’s office was just little taller than her late husband, who stood 6 feet 5.

Cooley said that he expected extradition to take at least a couple of months and that such cases can take time to go to trial.

Teri March said she knows the journey is far from over.

“At this stage, I anticipate I am going to attend the trial. I have a lot of answers I need.... I want to know how could he do it,” she said. “Our lives have been on hold to this moment. It is a step nearer closure.”