Killers lived in the small house nestled between two freeways and a cemetery in East Los Angeles. Ray Lugo, a longtime detective for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, was sure of it.
From 2014 to 2018, three people were gunned down within a two-mile radius of the house on Humphreys Avenue. Each victim had ties to Anthony Velasquez, who shared the home with his father, Manuel.
Lugo had clues pointing to the father and son: A fight with one of the victims. Ballistic evidence. A description of a car that matched the one in the Velasquez family’s driveway.
What the detective didn’t have was anyone willing to testify.
Cut off from the rest of East Los Angeles by the 60 and 710 freeways and the Calvary Cemetery, the neighborhood where the younger Velasquez spent his whole life was an “island,” Lugo said.
“That community is really, really tight,” said the detective, who grew up in a different part of East Los Angeles. “Everybody knows each other.”
To hear Lugo tell it, Velasquez lived like a recluse in the home his grandparents had purchased. He claimed to a probation officer that he worked as a custodian in a meat processing factory, but plainclothes detectives who kept him under surveillance reported to Lugo that he rarely ventured out. He didn’t even own a cellphone.
Anthony Velasquez stands for a booking photo taken by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which investigated him for three homicides.
(Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)
His father, who made a living as a driveway mechanic, also stayed home, Lugo said.
Lugo made no secret of the fact that he considered the father and son suspects. He impounded their car, tapped Manuel’s phone and arranged for deputies to post fliers on their street that solicited leads.
None of it seemed to work.
“He felt extremely safe,” Lugo said of the younger Velasquez. “When the neighbors fear you, you feel empowered.”
In their insular community, where neighbors have lived alongside one another for generations, the Velasquez family was the odd one out.
The son was a “loner,” said Diana Prieto, the niece of one victim, but people knew enough to fear him.
The first homicide was carried out near flawlessly, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Catherine Mariano. The prosecutor traced the motive to a fight in 2014 between Velasquez and Jesus Avalos, 33, who lived a few blocks from the Velasquez home.
Velasquez, then 23, had shown up to Avalos’ house looking for a woman. Told she wasn’t there, he got angry and fired a gun in the air before leaving, Lugo said.
Jesus Antonio Avalos, shown with his family in an undated photograph, was found shot to death on Feb. 11, 2014.
(Bertha Avalos)
Avalos and Velasquez hung out in the same circle of friends who drank beer and smoked methamphetamine together, Lugo said. They called each other by nicknames. Avalos was “Gilligan.” Velasquez was “Clowner.”
Short and pale, with acne scars pitting his cheeks, Velasquez tattooed “Clowner” across the front of his neck. His nickname suggested he was the joker of the crowd, the one who provided the laughs at his own expense, Lugo said.
“He was always the outsider,” the detective said. “He was never part of the crowd.”
After the gunshot incident, Avalos demanded Velasquez come back to the house and settle their issues with a one-on-one fight. Avalos “pummeled” Velasquez in the frontyard, then hugged him and shook his hand, the detective said.
The two men ate dinner and drank beer together, the issue seemingly behind them. But as Velasquez left the house, Lugo said, he slammed the door behind him.
A few hours later, Avalos got a call from Velasquez’s father, according to phone records shown in court. Deputies found Avalos’ blue Toyota 4Runner a few hours later in the city of Commerce. He was parked against traffic with the hood up, as if he was going to give someone a jump start.
The engine was running; the headlights were still on. Avalos hadn’t even unbuckled his seat belt before someone fired two bullets into his head and chest, according to a coroner’s report. There were no witnesses or surveillance cameras that captured Avalos’ killer.
But the next killing wasn’t so calculated.
On July 6, 2015, a year after Avalos was gunned down, Velasquez was hanging out behind an apartment building on Eagle Street with Eduardo Robles and a half-dozen others.
Robles, 38, confronted Velasquez, accusing him of killing Avalos, his close friend. Witnesses told Lugo that Velasquez scaled a gate and walked to Robles’ GMC Jimmy. He slashed the tires and bent the antenna before running off.
Five minutes later, a man opened fire from the driveway of the apartment complex, shooting Robles in the back and head.
Eduardo Robles was killed July 6, 2015, in East Los Angeles.
(Llisel Robles)
Although several witnesses described to Lugo how Velasquez vandalized Robles’ car, none would identify the shooter, who was so brazen he did not wear a mask, the detective said.
“From the outside, you’re like, ‘Duh — if I saw something like that, I’d share that information,’” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Negin Mostadim. But people in the neighborhood were so afraid, they would rather go on living next to a killer than risk informing on one, the prosecutor said.
It was three years later when the next associate of Velasquez turned up dead.
In the early morning hours of April 22, 2018, a masked man crept through a homeless encampment outside the courthouse in East Los Angeles.
He walked slowly, surveillance footage showed, peering into makeshift dwellings before finding what he was looking for inside a yellow and gray tent. The suspect killed Amanda Nicole Lopez, 27, with a blast from his shotgun, according to a coroner’s report.
Lopez considered Anthony Velasquez a friend, Mostadim said. Velasquez let her take showers at his home, washed her clothes and drove her around.
But Lopez “was not interested in him the way he was in her,” Mostadim said. “He was upset because he was doing so much for her and she wasn’t reciprocating.”
After Lopez’s death, Lugo was convinced Velasquez was the common denominator between all three homicides, but there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest him.
Faced with another dead end, Lugo and the Sheriff’s Department went public in 2021. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors offered $80,000 for information about the killings. Deputies posted fliers on telephone poles outside the Velasquez home. They included two sketch portraits that somewhat resembled Velasquez and his father.
Amanda Nicole Lopez, known to family and friends as “Nikki,” was shot to death inside a tent in East Los Angeles on April 22, 2018.
(Rozelle Lopez)
After two eyewitnesses to the Robles killing came forward, detectives arrested Velasquez and his father on Sept. 23, 2021.
Both refused to make a statement. Lugo suspected the son was the shooter in all three homicides, but he wanted to hear it from the younger Velasquez himself.
Lugo and his partner, Det. Leo Sanchez, arranged for Velasquez to be held in a jail cell rigged with hidden microphones.
“We needed him to talk,” Lugo said.
Locked in the cell, Velasquez griped that he was being framed for murder. His two cellmates told him to relax.
“You guys seem like good people,” Velasquez said, according to a tape of the conversation that was played in court.
In fact, they were informants who had been instructed to tease incriminating statements from Velasquez.
He was charged with three murders, Velasquez said, but “they don’t know what’s up.”
“There’s more murders than that?” an informant asked.
“More than fingers I can count,” Velasquez said.
L.A. County sheriff’s deputies take Manuel Velasquez into custody on Sept. 23, 2021.
(Matthew Ormseth / Los Angeles Times)
After he killed, “I go to sleep like a baby,” he said. “I don’t trip on it. It wasn’t easy at first. The first one, though. Of course my dad is tripping on me, ‘Are you really like this?’”
Velasquez said his father drove the getaway car in two shootings. It was when they began killing together, Velasquez said, that he started “showing my dad who I really was.”
Velasquez said he wanted his victims to know who was killing them. “I gave them my voice before them all,” he said. “I would give them my voice, so they’d know it was me.”
Velasquez described the steps he took to outsmart the police. He put duct tape on his shoes and tires to obscure footprints or treads. He “tricked out” his guns so they couldn’t leave casings and “chopped” the weapons after using them. He even burned off his fingerprints with a “hot butter knife.”
One of the informants asked about witnesses. “No one wants to f—ing testify,” Velasquez said.
The only person who knew all the details, Velasquez said, was his father.
“We never included nobody, we never met anybody,” he told the cellmates. “You know what I mean? We were at home and we stayed home. We never partied, we never went out, nothing.”
After his son’s unwitting confession, Manuel Velasquez pleaded no contest to manslaughter and accessory to murder. He was sentenced in February to serve 11 years and eight months in prison.
The father was “100% loyal to his son,” said Mariano, the prosecutor. “Whatever his son was doing, he was going to do whatever he could to make sure he wasn’t getting into trouble for it.”
Last month, a jury convicted Anthony Velasquez of three counts of murder. Before he was sentenced to 150 years to life in prison, relatives of Avalos, Robles and Lopez wept and shouted as they described their loss. Velasquez stared straight ahead, Lugo said.
Velasquez had railed in the jail recording about the “Lieutenant Lugo” who had harassed his family for years.
“He’s pissed because he wants to retire,” Velasquez said of the detective, who has been a sheriff’s deputy for 44 years, “but he wants to get credit before he retires.”
Anthony Velasquez’s attorney, Leslie Ann Boyce, said her client maintains his innocence and plans to appeal his conviction.
Lugo said he knows Velasquez and his family despise him.
“It’s mutual,” he said.