In 2008, Los Angeles county sheriff’s murder investigator Kevin Lloyd was preparing to testify as an expert in a gang case by poring over a photo album of tattoos. Then one picture stopped him.
The photograph - now widely published on the internet - shows a dark-haired man with a tattoo of a liquor store emblazoned across his chest. It was a scene from the east Los Angeles suburb of Pico Rivera where Lloyd had worked four years before. Upon closer inspection, Lloyd could see intricate details, including a light post, store Christmas lights and gunfire.
“(Anthony Garcia’s tattoo) showed a ‘Mr Peanut’ character getting shot from a helicopter under the banner ‘Rivera Kills’. Lloyd knew that ‘peanut’ was a term for a rival gang and ‘chopper’ was the nickname of the person Lloyd was staring at - Anthony Garcia,” stated an AOL News report, describing how it was the telltale tattoo that served as a virtual confession, linking Garcia to a murder that had gone unsolved since January 2004.
Garcia’s tattoo has a man with the body of a peanut being hit by bullets and falling back towards a liquor store. The tattoo even showed the Christmas lights that were hanging from the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was shot dead.
And it included a street lamp and sign from across the street.
The whole scene was sketched out under the chilling banner of ‘RIVERA KILLS’, a reference to the Los Angeles Latino street gang, Rivera-13.
Police only this week revealed how the chance breakthrough came out of the blue when Garcia’s tattoo caught Lloyd’s attention as it reminded him of a murder case he’d helped probe years earlier. And so Lloyd helped set up a sting to trick the 25-year-old into confessing to the killing.
Garcia had only been arrested on a minor traffic offence and his bare chest was photographed because gang graffiti artists often mark their own bodies with the same signatures they spray on buses and storefronts.
Gang members also sometimes have tattoos that could help link them to a crime.
At the time, the tattoo meant nothing to the officers who arrested Garcia and he was released. Homicide Lieutenant Dave Dolson said it was unheard of for a tattoo to lay out a detailed crime scene: “I haven’t seen it before and I haven’t heard of anything like it, either.”
After Lloyd recognised the mural, sheriff’s detectives arrested Garcia for the shooting and officers, posing as gang members, got a confession from him as he bragged to them about carrying out the shooting.
This week it led to a first-degree murder conviction in a case that police had at one time given up hope of ever solving.
Lloyd had been at the scene of the murder in 2004 when he was a station sergeant in Pico Rivera, Los Angeles.
“I worked Pico Rivera a lot of years, so I’m pretty familiar with that area,” he said.
“Think about it. He tattooed his confession on his chest. You have a degree of fate with this,” added Captain Mike Parker.
“The detective who spotted it had been a Pico sergeant who went on to become a homicide sergeant.
“I never worked Pico station. I never would have recognised that Pico liquor store.”
Prosecutor deputy district attorney Brock Lunsford has described the case as extraordinary.
“You see him as an exhibit because he has such detail. The victim is actually (falling) down in the right place. The copter is shooting from the right to the left.”
Lunsford said the tattoo was identical to the scene where unarmed rival gang member Juarez was ambushed and gunned down outside Ed’s Liquor. Juarez was on the telephone in a nearby phone booth. After hanging up, he was walking away when Garcia approached and used the common gang phrase: “Where are you from?” before firing.
Garcia didn’t have a personal connection to Juarez, who just happened to be in an area that Garcia’s gang had claimed as its turf.
“He’s an extremely arrogant man, but not stupid. He got away with this murder for a while,” Lunsford said.
“He was proud of what he did. His arrogance just got the better of him.”
This week Garcia, 25, was convicted of the 2004 murder that plays across his chest like a beacon proclaiming: “I’m guilty.”
He will be sentenced on May 19 in Norwalk, California and faces a minimum of 65 years in prison.
Yesterday Garcia’s father and two girlfriends were charged with theft and other crimes for collecting unemployment payments for him while he was in jail. - The Star