Los Angeles County sheriff’s homicide detectives are looking for possible links among the recent slayings of four homeless people in Willowbrook, including the killing of former NFL lineman Kevin Johnson, who was stabbed to death last month.
Johnson, 55, known in his playing days as “Big Kev,” was found dead after sheriff’s deputies on Jan. 21 got a call of an unconscious man at a homeless encampment where he had been living. Responding paramedics declared the former player dead at the scene.
The Los Angeles County medical examiner listed the journeyman NFL player’s cause of death as “blunt force trauma” and “stab wounds.”
Homicide detectives say his slaying was one of four since October of people living in a homeless encampment on East 120th Street near Central Avenue. Authorities are now investigating whether any of the deaths are related or the work of the same perpetrator.
“We are looking at the possibility that they are connected,” said Nicole Nishida, a department spokeswoman, adding that at this early stage it is just one path being pursued and that no conclusions have been made.
The proximity of the killings to each other and that all the victims are from the same unhoused community along the Compton Creek, just south of Los Angeles, has ignited the concern that one or more may be tied together.
But each slaying had a different method.
The first slaying was on Oct. 5. A woman, later identified as Michelle Steele, 52, was shot in the head. She, like Johnson, was unhoused. Steele survived more than a month in the hospital before succumbing to her injuries on Nov. 12.
Then, on Dec. 4, a 52-year-old homeless man was killed in the riverbed embankment. Someone inflicted head and neck trauma on Octavio Arias that proved fatal, according to the medical examiner’s findings.
On Jan. 21, Johnson, who once played for the Oakland Raiders and the Philadelphia Eagles, was killed.
Five days later, Mauro Alfaro, 52, became the encampment’s fourth victim. Alfaro died of multiple injuries in what the medical examiner deemed a homicide. Details on the manner of death were not immediately available.
Eight homicide detectives — two per case — are looking into the killings. The motives in each remain unknown. But the recent wave of violence highlights how overrepresented L.A. County’s unhoused community members are as victims of violent crime.
In some areas, such as downtown L.A.’s Skid Row, gang members have preyed on the homeless, forcing them to sell drugsor pay so-called taxes or rent to stay at a street location. Similar encampments have become targets of gang activity, investigators have found.
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