The two bodies discovered on a brush-covered slope in the Montecito Hills were not easily identified.
The victims were “faceless” after being shot and bludgeoned beyond recognition, according to Los Angeles County prosecutor Stephen Lonseth.
But there were clues: A tattoo with a family name. Fingernails painted aqua blue, a teenage girl’s beauty routine.
One had the word “hoe” written on her stomach in blood. The autopsy showed she was around seven weeks pregnant.
Investigators found the remains in a ditch in Ernest E. Debs Regional Park on Oct. 28, 2015. Using tattoos and dental records, police identified the victims as Gabriella Calzada, 19, and Brianna Gallegos, 17, who was carrying the baby.
Police interviewed a prime suspect within the first week: Jose Echeverria, 18, whose name Gallegos had tattooed on her chest. Four months later, detectives seemingly caught him confessing on a jailhouse recording that he and Dallas Pineda, 17, had brought the young women to the park and killed them.
But what seemed like an open-and-shut case dragged on for nearly a decade. Until Monday, when a jury convicted Echeverria and Pineda of first-degree murder.
Even by the glacial standards of L.A. County — where proceedings are known to crawl along due to frequent delays and a pandemic-fueled backlog — the path to justice was painfully slow.
The recent trial dredged up old memories, with some evidence suggesting gang loyalties pushed Echeverria and Pineda to commit the grisly crime — while prosecutor David Ayvazian alleged a more sinister motive.
“They didn’t kill these girls because they were rivals, they used that as an excuse. They liked it,” Ayvazian said. “They set up this murder. They beat these girls to a bloody pulp.”
When prosecutors displayed gruesome crime scene photos that showed how Calzada and Gallegos looked when they were found, some members of the jury recoiled. One woman covered her mouth in shock. Someone in the courtroom whispered: “Jesus.”
Adam Garcia, who discovered the bodies while walking his dogs, testified that so much time had passed he could recall only “flashes” of what he saw. Judging by the amount of blood, he assumed a coyote had killed something.
“I can’t hold the image too well,” he said. “It was shocking, I guess, for me to see that.”
Police questioned Echeverria in his home a week after the killings. He said he had been in a relationship with Gallegos, but it was winding down because she got out of hand when she drank. They socialized with Pineda and Calzada, who were a couple.
In a photo displayed in court, the four smile and pose holding beer cans, arms slung over each other’s shoulders.
“I remember making bad choices as a kid,” prosecutor Ayvazian said during closing arguments, referencing the girls’ decision to hang out with Echeverria and Pineda. He called them “wannabe gangsters.”
Detectives noted that Echeverria had scratch marks on his arms, as if he’d been in a struggle. He went by the nicknames “Klepto” and “Diablo,” and had recently been jumped into 18th Street, a large street gang.
But investigators had no weapon or links that connected him to the crime scene.
Trial evidence showed Echeverria used the Facebook messaging app to plan a meet-up with Gallegos and Calzada in Debs Park.
Valeria Maldonado, now 29, was living with Calzada and her parents when she went missing. Maldonado said the last time they spoke was by phone, when Calzada and Gallegos were headed by bus to Echeverria’s neighborhood.
The next day, after Calzada didn’t come home, Maldonado reached out to Echeverria, who said the girls never showed up for their planned meeting.
“Man she was the girl” Echeverria wrote.
Prosecutors noted that his use of past tense was suspicious. Although the bodies had been discovered in the park that morning, they had not yet been identified. All anyone knew was that Calzada and Gallegos were missing.
Maldonado answered with a question mark.
“She the home girl thas what I meant , have mas love for her” Echeverria wrote.
Four months after the young women turned up dead, Echeverria was arrested as a suspect in a drive-by gang shooting. Detectives put him in a cell with an undercover informant, who posed as a fellow 18th Street member. Still new to the gang, Echeverria fell for the ruse.
The informant asked Echeverria how the women he called his friends ended up in the park, according to a translation of the conversation in Spanish played in court.
“Well, we took them up there,” Echeverria said, recounting how they first shot at the women with a .22 rifle.
“Okay, so after you guys shot them, they didn’t completely die?” the informant asked.
“No,” Echeverria said.
“So what did you do?”
“Ah … con una piedra.” Echeverria said. “Uh … with a rock.”
They didn’t plan the killing ahead of time, Echeverria told the informant, but were provoked when one of them said, “F— 18th Street.”
Echeverria faked an alibi by taking Calzada’s phone and using her Facebook account to call himself after the killings, he told the informant.
Afterward, Echeverria said he took the phone, smashed it with a hammer until it leaked battery acid, put it in a sock and tossed it on top of Huntington Elementary School.
LAPD Det. Frank Carrillo testified that when he and his partner climbed on top of the school, they found a smashed phone inside a black sock.
Echeverria’s younger friend Pineda was also in police custody, and authorities decided to pull the same move on him. Locked up in juvenile hall, Pineda unburdened himself to an informant whom investigators arranged to be his cellmate.
According to a recording of the conversation played in court, Pineda said he feared older members of 18th Street would “greenlight” him because they had killed two young women without permission.
The gun they used had been given to someone else to get rid of, he said, and Echeverria went back to the scene with his brother to pick up the shell casings before the bodies were found. Pineda took the “big ass rock” they used to beat the girls and threw it in a nearby dumpster.
The gun, rock and casings were never found by police.
“We picked up afterwards,” Pineda told the informant.
Although both men admitted to aspects of the murder, defense attorney for Pineda, Mia Yamamoto, argued that the evidence did not show that he participated in the violence at all; instead, she painted him as an innocent bystander paralyzed by fear and implicated by a burst of violence from Echeverria.
Pineda allegedly missed three or four times with the rifle before Echeverria pulled the gun from him and shot Gallegos.
“How can you miss unless you’ve intended to miss?” Yamamoto asked.
Despite the recordings that made it seem like an open-and-shut case, the prosecutions of Echeverria and Pineda stretched on for years, winding through the L.A. County courts.
“This case took nearly 10 years to resolve due to a series of legal and procedural requirements beyond the control of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office,” the office said in a statement to The Times.
Initially filed as a death penalty case and subjected to a lengthy review, the process of seeking to try Pineda as an adult further prolonged the proceedings.
Both defendants had other cases pending that needed to be resolved before the trial began, furthering the delays, according to the D.A.’s office.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the state — and by extension, the court system. It aged the case by at least three years, said Ayvazian, the prosecutor.
Even as Echeverria and Pineda’s fate went to the jury last week, delays continued. Jurors told the court one person was holding out because they believed the jailhouse tapes should not have been permitted as evidence.
On Monday afternoon, the foreperson finally read out the verdict, finding Echeverria and Pineda guilty on two counts of murder in the first degree. The convictions, combined with charging enhancements added for the crime of “lying in wait” and committing multiple killings, will ensure life terms when when they are sentenced in December.
Families of the two victims did not respond to interview requests.
After the verdict Monday, Calzada’s mother was seen tearfully thanking the jury in Spanish. The long wait for justice was finally over.
“Thank you. God bless you,” she said.
The post ‘Wannabe gangsters’ described killing two women. Why did convicting them take a decade? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
