High in the mountains above Los Angeles, the kidnappers pressed a gun against Juan’s stomach and handed him a phone after making a call on FaceTime.
Juan, who testified at a preliminary hearing Tuesday in L.A. County without revealing his last name, said he recognized his neighbor’s face on the screen that morning last February.
Juan said he considered the neighbor, Francisco Javier Perez, a friend. What he didn’t know was his neighbor had a secret life. Perez was a high-level drug trafficker with connections to an unnamed Mexican drug cartel, prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Prosecutors charge that Juan was kidnapped, stabbed, shot and pushed off a cliff after Perez ordered him killed. But the men Perez allegedly hired botched the job — allowing Juan to escape and testify about what were supposed to be his last moments.
Perez’s attorney, Jennifer Gitlin, said she’d seen no evidence her client was affiliated with a cartel. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder, kidnapping, robbery, drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder.
The case against Perez, who is accused of orchestrating the abduction from Tijuana, is a rare example, authorities said, of extreme cartel violence playing out on U.S. soil.
“I’ve been doing this for quite some time,” Superior Court Judge Hayden Zacky said at the close of the hearing Wednesday. “I haven’t seen a case quite like this one. This is very high-level, cartel-like behavior.”
Juan testified he was blamed for losing a load of drugs. But he hadn’t crossed Perez in a deal. In his telling, he wasn’t even involved in the drug trade at all. It began with a mundane favor.
Juan had introduced Perez to a friend who ran a business handling Department of Motor Vehicle paperwork and smog checks. Perez wanted his Honda Accord registered and smog-certified. While working on the car, Juan’s friend found a duffel bag full of drugs and panicked. He abandoned the Honda on the side of the road and placed an anonymous call to the police.
That call set in motion a chain of events: A rendezvous at a Home Depot for masks and gloves. An abduction at a gas station in Sylmar. Then the moment in the mountains where Juan came face to face with his neighbor.
“He told me that I was going to die,” Juan recalled.
**
Juan limped into a fourth-floor courtroom in San Fernando with a cane and settled gingerly into the witness stand. Testifying in Spanish, he said he was on his way to work installing fiber-optic cables the morning of Feb. 21, 2024, when he stopped to buy some tamales in Sylmar.
He pulled his Ford Edge SUV into a gas station on Roxford Street. As he waited for his tamales, two men approached from either side. One poked a gun into his stomach. If he ran, they warned Juan, they’d kill him on the spot.
Prosecutors played surveillance footage that showed a silver SUV and black sedan pull into the gas station, blocking Juan’s Ford. “They looked like a special forces group,” Zacky said in his ruling.
The two men forced Juan into the back seat of his car. In court, Juan identified the one behind the wheel as Juan Bernal, a 34-year-old Tijuana resident. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of kidnapping, robbery, attempted murder and conspiring to commit murder.
As Bernal drove toward the mountains, Juan testified that the men in the back seat beat him and threatened to kill him. One jabbed a gun at his stomach. The other took Juan’s pocketknife and stabbed him in the leg, he said.
Bernal stopped at a horse ranch. The silver SUV and black sedan had followed them. He heard the men talking about digging a hole. The trunk of the SUV opened. Juan said he saw shovels and pickaxes.
One of the men took Juan’s pocketknife. He sliced Juan’s palm and stuck the blade under his fingernails. Juan said the men told him they were going to “bury” him.
At that moment, Juan said, a passing motorist blew his horn. The men got spooked and got back in the cars. As they drove farther into the mountains, the man to Juan’s right raked the knife across his cheek. He still bears the scar.
The three-car caravan stopped at a turnout. Bernal handed a phone to Juan. It was Perez, he testified.
**
A prosecutor asked Juan to identify Perez in court. He hesitated before pointing across the courtroom to a man with a weather-beaten face.
“Barba blanca,” he said. White beard.
Juan knew Perez, a stocky man with dark curly hair and a beard that trailed halfway down his chest, as “Paco.”
Perez, 62, lived one door away from Juan in Bell Gardens. Perez split his time between the city in southeast Los Angeles County and Tijuana, where his wife lived, Juan said.
If Perez is part of a drug cartel, as prosecutors alleged in seeking to raise his bail, he maintained a low profile. In Bell Gardens, at least, he lived in a run-down apartment building; he drove a Honda Accord and a Chevrolet Silverado.
But deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department considered Perez a major drug trafficker. A deputy testified he detained Perez in Bell Gardens in 2022 and searched his car, seizing a duffel bag with 13 kilograms of meth and 10,000 counterfeit fentanyl pills. It’s unclear why he wasn’t charged at the time with possessing the drugs.
Juan testified he didn’t know his neighbor to be involved in drug dealing. Perez was kind to him, he said, once lending him money when he was short on rent.
They were cordial to each other but didn’t socialize much, Juan said. Every now and then they’d have a carne asada. Perez came to parties at Juan’s house “maybe once or twice.”
It was at one of those parties that Juan introduced Perez to his friend Walter. Juan testified he didn’t know Walter’s last name. Walter’s business was registering cars with the DMV and certifying smog checks.
Walter agreed to handle the paperwork for Perez’s Accord. After he got the vehicle he called Juan, panicked over finding drugs. “I told Walter, ‘Let the car be taken by the police,’” Juan recalled. “Don’t get involved in any problems.’”
The Whittier Police Department received an anonymous call alerting them to a car on Santa Fe Springs Road with drugs inside, a detective testified. Officers peered inside the silver Honda Accord. Two large Ziploc bags were on the front seat. A duffel bag was on the floorboard. They appeared to be full of methamphetamine. The officers impounded the car.
Juan called his neighbor and relayed what Walter had said. Enraged, Perez said Juan owed him money. If he didn’t pay, Juan recalled him warning, “I wasn’t going to last two, three days.”
According to Juan, Perez said he wasn’t just going to kill him. Perez’s wife got on the phone and threatened his daughter, he testified. “They said they were going to cut her into pieces and I was going to eat her,” he recalled.
**
In the mountains, Juan said Perez gave an order to the other men in the car via FaceTime: “Kill him. Get his wife and daughter and kill them.”
Bernal started down the road again. Juan fought for his life. He wrestled with the man to his right for the gun. The man to his left grabbed him and Juan bit his hand. The man with the gun shot Juan in the back, then fired two more shots in his abdomen.
“I was exhausted,” Juan testified. “I said, ‘I’m not going to fight anymore. I’m going to pretend to be dead.’” He shut his eyes and tried not to breathe.
They came to a stop. Juan heard the men talk about setting the car on fire. One of the men said they should shoot Juan in the head. “Leave it as it is,” another said. “The f—’s already dead.”
The men tipped the Ford into a ravine with Juan inside. It rolled down a cliff and came to rest in a thicket of brush. Juan crawled out and pulled himself up to Little Tujunga Canyon Road.
He spent the next 17 days in and out of surgery for a broken back, perforated intestines, a blood clot in his lungs and three gunshot wounds, he testified. His left foot is permanently injured, he said, and it is still painful to walk.
Los Angeles Police Department detectives put out a wanted vehicle alert for a black Volkswagen Passat used in the abduction. They learned that U.S. Border Patrol agents had stopped the car on the 5 Freeway in San Clemente at 9:45 on the morning that Juan was kidnapped.
Three men were inside: Bernal, Ramon Terriquez and Alejandro Medina. They told the agents they were Mexican nationals in the U.S. illegally and agreed to be deported immediately, Det. Guillermo De La Riva of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division testified.
Before sending the men to Mexico, the agents examined Terriquez’s phone. It contained photographs taken at a Home Depot in Commerce the night before the kidnapping, De La Riva said. The detective obtained surveillance footage from the store. The footage showed Terriquez buying gloves and a type of hooded mask that painters use. Bernal and Perez were at the Home Depot as well, according to the footage.
De La Riva arrested Terriquez, 30, and Bernal in July 2024. Perez was already in custody.
Terriquez claimed to police he merely drove the Volkswagen used in the kidnapping. Terriquez said he thought they were going to abduct Juan, not kill him, De La Riva testified.
Bernal also denied a conspiracy to kill Juan. He said someone had issued a “contract” of $70,000 to collect $200,000 that Juan owed to an unknown party, De La Riva testified.
After two days of testimony, lawyers for Perez, Bernal and Terriquez asked the judge to dismiss the charges for a lack of evidence. An attorney for Terriquez, who has pleaded not guilty, noted his client wasn’t in the car where Juan was stabbed and shot. “At most, Mr. Terriquez took a passive role in this kidnapping plot,” the attorney, Joel Garcia, told Zacky.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacques Garden said there were signs the plan was murder all along. They bought masks but didn’t wear them, Garden said, “because they knew Juan is not coming back and is not going to be a witness.”
There were also the tools in the SUV. “You don’t bring shovels to a kidnapping,” Garden said.
Zacky agreed, ruling there was enough evidence for the defendants to stand trial on charges of kidnapping, robbery, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
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