For the first time in 30 years, the Los Angeles Coroner’s office will conduct an independent inquest. Gabe Ortiz has filed a diary on this already. As an adjunct to this development, details of the interagency battle between the coroner and the Sheriff’s department are coming to light. The Los Angeles Times investigative reporter who has done the most work covering the killing of Andres Guardado, ALENE TCHEKMEDYIAN has filed a fascinating story that peeks inside this “unprecedented” war for the truth and the power to cover or uncover it. Her story is every bit as important as the news itself that Andres Guardado may yet find some peace and justice in his grave, because it shows how such murder is swept under the rug.
Andres Guardado, 18 years old, was most definitely murdered by LA Sheriff’s deputy Miguel Vega after being chased by Sheriff’s Deputies Miguel Vega and Chris Hernandez in Gardena, California, an unincorporated part of the greater Los Angeles city/county metroplex. His body contained no drugs of alcohol, he committed no crime, had a clean record, was working one of two jobs and enrolled in technical school at the time of his killing. His family swears he never owned or carried a gun. He told relatives he himself had considered a career as a cop. He had no gang affiliation, no colored clothing or tattoos to indicate gang related activity, nor was the auto shop he associated with considered gang affiliated. What they did was sell nitrus oxide to street racers, a grey area that is not illegal but had drawn the prior attention of law enforcement. Andres was seemingly acting as a lookout and went to warn his friends when he was briefly chased and then shot five times in the back by deputies who themselves have allegations of gang activity, suspicious pasts of lying to investigators and fabricating evidence, and whose separate stories fail to fully corroborate one another. Cameras and eye witnesses were present, and deputies in a panic immediately smashed six to eight wall mounted cameras in a likely attempt to buy time to find and plant a throwdown gun. Yet the usual police department procedure, cop union rules, media-managed spin and PR and slow-waking of information kept the suspicious killing off the top shelf of public attention for months.
Something specific and detailed is happening, so I want to speak to these issues and not just the general trend of young men murdered by law enforcement officers going free. While this case echoes so many tragic others in the march of travesties of justice, something new is happening here. An agency, the Coroner’s office is for the first time I can remember acting in opposition to the machine that clears these killers from responsibility. We’ve not seen anything like it before in modern times but the history of a power struggle between a Sheriff and a Coroner goes all the way back to the times of the Magna Carta. These two functionaries of government are meant to act as a check and balance on one another. Once again we may see the proper function of this relationship play out in an important case on a national stage.
Below the fold, I have much to say on the small but significant mistakes in LA Times coverage of this killing, the specifics of the murder and what proof is already in the public domain, the timeline of truth and lies revealed and way, way too much fascinating speculation regarding the details of that evening in June when an unarmed young man was executed for no good reason. I welcome any and all comment on the larger subject at hand and write this diary mostly for myself to set to record the “state of play” as a close observer sees it at present. This is a war for the soul of Los Angeles on the scale of any passion play ever enacted. And it’s indicative of how the system acts to condone murder by LEOs. But let’s examine the details as well as speak to the larger picture, for the details show how to get away with murder.
The timeline of this killing and that aftermath of it are vital to understanding what is happening here. A short version of it would go about like this: In the immediate wake of the George Floyd protests, which caused widespread property destruction in Los Angeles, a teen was shot by county deputies last June under suspicious circumstances and the facts were suppressed harshly by an embattled Sheriff, Alex Villanueva who was already on public notice for his seeming personal corruption. A campaign of what amounts to the usual amount of post-shooting spin failed to quiet the pubic but the scandal also failed to galvanize national attention like the killing of Floyd because even though it too may have been captured on video, deputies acted quickly to destroy area security cameras and confiscate the DVR that may have recorded the chase and shooting. (So quickly as reportedly to not first obtain a warrant for the panicked camera-smashing and tape-deck grabbing.). Everything else that occurred should be viewed in the light of this all-important action- the killing might have been on video and deputies acted suspiciously because of it, and LASD acted as a department to obscure that suspicious act.
Everything else flows from this, even though the “juicy” detail is that the teen was shot five times in the back in a manner that proves murder. That comes later, and as we shall see, much later. Slow-walking the truth is vital to Villanueva’s attempt to both keep the peace in LA country and hold onto his power as Sheriff. He who controls the timeline controls the truth. Like a good thriller movie, it’s not what happened that matters, it is when the audience is told which detail that makes the plot stay up in the air and suspenseful for the longest amount of time.
This all-important event, the smashing of cameras was JOB ONE of the PR wing of the Sheriff’s department to obfuscate, spin and bury. Quickly they dismissed questions that arose by claiming the deputies were “searching for memory cards” on outdoor security cameras that had wires leading indoors to a DVR. The excuse is pathetically feeble, yet so much was swirling around that the false story and faulty logic seems to have sufficed for most. No security system in existence places memory cards where burglars and vandals can have easy access to them. Auto body shops are not in the business of mounting free GoPros to the side of their walls, either. Yet this obvious fact escaped the mainstream press.
LASDs do not wear body cams unlike LAPD, who do. (This is finally, finally starting to change this month, the culmination of a slow-walk by Villanueva that has been part of a larger political battle between he and the LA County Board of Supervisors) Once the situation on the ground was stabilized by the cordoning off of possible witnesses, and the possibility of activity around the still-warm body being videotaped was prevented, it seems likely (and almost impossible to prove, absent a confession by the participants) that a “throwdown gun” was placed near the corpse. One unnoticed camera across the street recorded some of this camera-smashing activity but the footage eventually fell into the hands of the LASD who have only released the early parts, that show the start of a foot chase down to a hidden from view alley where the shooting took place. Vital information is on this tape, (hard drive, actually) including the potential of a timeline of when the security cameras were disabled and by whom. On scene at the immediate time of the shooting were Deputies Chris Hernandez and Miguel Vega, but it remains unknown who from LASD arrived next and how quickly whomever did so acted to take down cameras that they believed might be recording the position of the body, the circumstances of the chase and shooting etc. and of course the arrival and positioning of a throw-down gun, if this indeed is what occurred. At minimum it seems likely that one of the two deputies had at least one person bring them the throwdown gun to plant. For all we know it was a whole squad who participated. Video exists that will speak to that, and the Coroner likely wants it.
Some of all this will likely never be known, but PARTS of all of this are for certain captured in evidence now in the hands of LASD alone.
Much, much more can be said about this, but for details on the murder itself please read my contemporaneous diaries. The short version is that killer deputy Miguel Vega did not agree to an interview with LASD Homicide division until public pressure came to a peak after weeks of stalling, and in the immediate wake of the family releasing a PARTIAL autopsy report that showed the teen was shot five times in the back. LASD knew he was shot five times in the back from the first hour of the incident, but managed to keep a lid on it for weeks and weeks. What the family report left out (likely deliberately) was HOW he was shot in the back five times. Once with a bullet traveling DOWN, and four times with the bullets traveling UP.
It seems clear that the killer deputy Miguel Vega was protected by his department but played by the family of Andres into finally giving a self-defense story that could be contorted into explaining away the “five shots in the back” fact but was then utterly devastated by the full ballistics of the Coroner’s autopsy report.
Vega claims that the teen ran away and was told to halt during a foot pursuit. Then according to Vega, he complied and halted, and was instructed to place the (supposed) firearm on the ground and that the teen did so. While not waiting for backup that was steps away, Vega then claims he holstered his gun (not procedure by any means, nor likely either if the teen was indeed armed, fleeing and with a gun in reach) as the teen got to his knees as instructed. Some version of what happened next has been recorded in greater detail by LASD homicide but Vega’s cop-union appointed lawyer claims that his client told investigators that after instructing the teen verbally not to reach for the gun, the teen then reached for the weapon anyway and he was forced to quick-draw and shoot the teen while of course in fear for his life “and the life of his partner.”
Immediately after this self-defense tale became public, the Coroner released the full autopsy report in defiance of the Sheriff’s security hold on the autopsy details. Villanueva blew a gasket, calling the defiance “unprecedented” and whining about it running the chances for a proper investigation to conclude. He’s seeming used that excuse to not conclude the investigation since that time. His logic, if you can follow it, is hat there were other witnesses to the shooting that now can use these details to color their testimony but the witnesses clearly were refusing to come forward to any LASD investigation anyway. One was a woman in the car at the curb who is rumored to have immigration issues and the other is “the third man” who was standing on the sidewalk and had a good view of what happened. Little to nothing is said about him, but he seems connected to the activity at the local auto shop that includes the selling of Nitros Oxide to street racers, a side hustle the body shop was conducting. Neither one was ever going to speak to the agency they likely watched murder an unarmed teen and proceed to wish it away.
What happens next, in the coming weeks and months is that the Coroner’s office has come to terms with the fact that even though they gave the details of the story to the public and the press months ago, they are now going to have to conduct an inquest to explain what it means. They have not done something like this in 30 years. It should be quite a show.
This second diagram alone proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that killer deputy Miguel Vega lied to investigators when he gave a self-defense story that somewhat fits the family autopsy report, the only details he had at his disposal. The fact that the coroner defied a “security hold” THE VERY NEXT DAY after Vega spoke to investigators to release these ballistic trajectory details should have been enough information (and salacious news) for the press and public to see what happened. Somehow, the press missed it, caught up still in the basic idea of “teen shot in the back five times.”
Nevertheless, the killer was caught in a clear lie. Murder charges should have followed immediately, but the LA County DA Jackie Lacey has never acted to hold officer accountable in the past, so why should she have started now? Now that the election has passed, and LA will get a new DA, we shall see what they intend to do. It appears the Coroner is willing to go the extra mile to put their feet to the fire.
This case stinks to gag a dog off of the proverbial gut wagon, top to bottom but the failures are also of the press and public not to recognize the transparent attempts at a cover-up by sheer dint of our glass-eyed reaction to 2020 in general. We’ve been numbed to this and it is the real shame of it all that murder most foul can be committed in broad daylight. All that needed to happen was for people to pay attention to the timeline and the facts, and to question authority and the official story. We are swept away in the overall culture wars, the big picture arguments and the political sideshows instead. The bare facts of the case are the last thing anyone cares to discuss outside of a trial. Maybe now, thanks to the bravery of the Coroner we might actually get one.