Dream Denied

Photo by Ted Soqui

Last october, Superior Court Judge William Pounders opened the door to José Luis Frutis, convicted in 1982 of a murder he swears he did not commit, to argue his innocence one more time.

On Monday, Pounders slammed that door shut. After hearing three days of testimony from prison guards, inmates, family members and Frutis himself, Pounders ruled there were insufficient grounds to erase the conviction.

Frutis attorney Antonio Rodriguez said he will appeal, but the decision appears to mark the final chapter in an odyssey for Frutis and his family. Their journey began amid the aimless violence and hard consequences of la vida locain the barrios of L.A.’s Eastside, and ends in the cellblocks and exercise yards of the state prison system. It was there that a fellow inmate first voiced, in 1996, a purported confession to the killing for which Frutis was convicted, and it is there Frutis will return to serve out the sentence for that crime.

The confession, offered by Joey Garcia, himself serving a life sentence for another murder, was the basis of Pounder’s interest in the case. Garcia recanted his confession when interviewed by a deputy district attorney in December, but he reasserted his confession in court in March; the judge restricted subsequent testimony to the question of Garcia’s veracity.

That proved a broad question, however, as elements of the original crime, and of the police investigation that followed, found their way into the record. What emerged was the picture of a family striving to pull itself out of the gang culture that engulfed it. By and large they succeeded, leaving the barrio for the suburbs, and immigrant poverty for middle-class careers. But José Luis never made it, doomed either by his own hand, in the commission of a heinous fatal beating, or by hard luck and a vengeful cop.

Hanging over the case, and referenced several times by Judge Pounders, was the fact that during the initial investigation, when Frutis was handcuffed in an LAPD interview room, he was shot in the chest by an officer. The defense at the time argued that the investigation was biased by dint of the shooting — that the officers had framed Frutis to cover up their own misconduct — but testimony regarding the incident was barred at trial. Pounders likewise expressed concern over the shooting, but declined to review the police investigation.

Pounders did, however, take testimony on the substance of Garcia’s confession. Garcia was, like Frutis, a member of the Third Street gang. He explained that he was Christmas shopping in November 1980, days after a fellow gang member had been shot and killed by rivals from Primera Flats, when he saw Jesse Porras, then 15, a member of that gang, strolling through neutral territory. By chance, he said, two other Third Streeters drove by. He flagged them down, left his girlfriend standing on the sidewalk and took off to exact revenge. Porras was beaten to death in broad daylight, across the street from a grade school with scores of children looking on.

Garcia did not elaborate in court, but in statements to prison officials and elsewhere, he identified his accomplices as fellow gangbangers Salvador Moran and Juan Morales. Moran, in fact, was identified during the initial trial as the owner of the car used in the murder, and Garcia’s fingerprints were lifted from the car at the time.

In testimony before Pounders, members of the Frutis family said that even before José Luis was arrested, they had learned that the trio of Garcia, Moran and Morales — Morales was known as Tamal, and with the other two comprised a clique inside the gang known as Los Tamales — had commited the crime. They learned it from Hector Gonzalez, the younger brother of José Luis’ wife.

Hector was 10 at the time, and on the school playground when the killing took place. He knew Los Tamales from the neighborhood — Morales lived just a block away.

When Hector recounted what he had seen to his mother, she warned him to keep quiet — she knew Los Tamales’ reputation — and relayed it to Frutis’ mother as neighborhood gossip. It wasn’t until two weeks later, after Frutis had been arrested, shot by the police and then charged, that his family realized their own stake in the Porras slaying.

Hector Gonzalez took the stand to describe the scene to Judge Pounders, as well as his decision to keep silent out of fear of retaliation. Frutis’ sister, Susana Preciado, testified as well. She knew Morales personally — he used to drop by for the meals she fixed for her brothers — and she decided to confront him. She went to find him at the All Nations Neighborhood Center on Soto Street, where she knew the Third Street gang hung out.

Preciado said she found him there with several other gang members. She called him out. “I told him I knew he was one of the persons who committed the crime,” she said, “that I had witnesses, and he had to come forward.” Morales reacted sharply, grabbing her by the arm and shoving her back out the door. “He said, ‘You better get out or you’re gonna get hurt,’” Preciado testified.