When Michael “Mosca” Torres was killed at California State Prison, Sacramento in July 2023, law enforcement officials suspected it was a power struggle within his organization, the Mexican Mafia.
Eight days later, police officers raced at 3 a.m. to a small house in San Fernando where, slumped in a recliner, they found a woman Torres had called his wife. Stephanie Rodriguez had been shot seven times at point blank range.
Later that day, detectives arrested Torres’ niece on suspicion of murder.
On Thursday, a judge handed Evelyn Torres, 36, a sentence of 30 years to life in prison after she pleaded no contest to a murder charge.
Torres did not speak during the hearing, and authorities have never established a clear motive in the case.
Rodriguez was 38 when she was killed. Her relatives on Thursday described her as a “protector” whose kindness lifted up their whole family.
“We live with grief, with anger, with questions that will never be answered,” Rodriguez’s sister said in a statement read aloud by a prosecutor.
The timing led some in law enforcement to suspect Rodriguez had been roped into whatever issues led to her partner’s death. Known as the Mexican Mafia’s dominant member from the San Fernando Valley, Michael Torres also controlled drug sales and extortion rackets in the L.A. County jails.
But when interviewed by detectives after her arrest, Torres spoke about her family dealing with unexpected grief.
“Everybody is f— dying,” she said, according to a transcript of her interview. “Another one bites the dust.”
The transcript shows L.A. County homicide detectives were struggling with similar questions of whether Rodriguez was the victim of a mob hit or something more mundane.
“Is this about my uncle or what?” Torres asked after she was brought to an interview room.
“It’s not about your uncle,” a detective replied. “I mean, it might be. It might have something to do with it. It probably does.”
Michael Torres, 59, was serving 133 years to life for attempted murder, conspiracy, gun crimes and witness tampering when two prisoners stabbed him to death on an exercise yard the morning of July 6, 2023.
Michael Torres had previously been convicted of killing two people. In 1981, he stabbed to death a drunk who had banged against his brother’s car, according to a probation report reviewed by The Times. Convicted of manslaughter and granted parole after four years, he killed a Pacoima gang member outside a market in 1990.
“Defendant is a cold-blooded, vicious, hostile, anti-social, criminally-oriented, evil individual who should never walk the streets of society again,” a deputy probation officer wrote in the report after Michael Torres was convicted of manslaughter a second time.
By the time Michael Torres was released from the maximum security prison at Pelican Bay in 2002, he’d been inducted into the Mexican Mafia, law enforcement officials testified at his later trial.
In 2003, Michael Torres shot a man who was falsely claiming membership in the Mexican Mafia. Sentenced to life in prison, he used cellphones to collect money from gangs and drug pushers in the San Fernando Valley and beyond, according to law enforcement records seen by The Times.
He also arranged for drugs to be smuggled into the Los Angeles County jails, where they were sold at huge markups. At the time of his death, Michael Torres was under indictment in Sacramento, charged with selling heroin to drug runners working for the Aryan Brotherhood.
Shortly before he was killed, his sister Carol died of natural causes, Evelyn Torres told detectives. After her uncle and aunt died, she said she moved into a home on Kewen Street once owned by Michael Torres’ mother.
Rodriguez was living there when she was killed. According to a relative of the Torres family who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, Rodriguez had been introduced to Michael Torres three years earlier. She moved into his mother’s house and spruced it up with a new fence and fresh coat of paint, the relative said.
The night of the shooting , Rodriguez got into an argument with Evelyn Torres.
Torres told detectives Rodriguez tried to kick her out. She claimed Rodriguez hit her in the face, then pulled out her phone. She thought Rodriguez was asking someone to come and kill her, she said.
In the interview with police, Evelyn Torres seemed paranoid, convinced someone was picking off her relatives one by one. She’d been shot in 2021, she said. Then her aunt and uncle died a few days apart.
Perhaps even her grandmother’s death three years earlier involved foul play, she said.
“When you take out all the Torreses, guess what? You get to take over,” she said. “You get to take everything. You just take us out. That’s what everybody’s doing. It’s been a domino.”
On Thursday, Rodriguez’s family told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David Fields her death had changed them forever. “Birthdays feel wrong, holidays feel incomplete,” her sister said. “There is an empty space where she should be.”
Rodriguez’s brother Stevie said what Evelyn Torres did was “inhumane,” noting his sister wasn’t a stranger to her killer.
“I know my sister, how much she was loved, how much she cared,” he told Torres, who didn’t meet his gaze in the courtroom. “Even about you.”
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