Murder on Montana Ave.

Santa Monica police say it could take years to determine all the victims' names and losses. They say Becerril led "a very broad and deep" fraud ring. Losses are expected to be in the millions.

On May 15, Becerril faces a preliminary hearing in downtown Los Angeles on murder and 31 other charges, including forgery, money laundering and grand theft. Becerril's wife, sister and an associate, Abram Guajardo — from AP Financial — face trial for fraud on June 6.

A painting by her son from Sofia Merman's collection

PHOTO BY SIMONE PAZ

Santa Monica's posh Montana Avenue, where violence is rare.

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More About

• Sofia Merman
• Sasha Merman
• Daniel Becerril
• New York Crime
• Murder and Homicide

Sasha Merman's killing stands out in part because it unfolded on one of California's toniest streets, Santa Monica's Montana Avenue. But it was also — unusually — the second murder in Santa Monica in four days. Earlier that week a Maxim model was strangled in her apartment three miles from Merman's condo. When the Los Angeles Times wrote the story up, one neighbor wondered if the two strange slayings might be linked to the economic downturn.

The Times wrote: " 'When crimes like this happen in Santa Monica, it doesn't bode well for the whole nation,' said Jack Rothstein, 57, a fiction writer who was passing by the crime scene this morning." He turned out to be an unusually prescient passerby.

Montana Avenue is a wide, tree-lined boulevard that runs along one side of the Brentwood Country Club through Santa Monica all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The Five Twenty complex sits five blocks from a palm-dotted jogging path overlooking the beach in a neighborhood frequented by celebrities like Jennifer Garner, Amber Valletta and Brooke Shields.

Sasha Merman — beloved art teacher and yearbook adviser at a tough school in Watts, warm and well-known figure in the tight-knit Russian community rooted in West Hollywood, and right-wing position player on the Fight'in Squirrels hockey team — lived in a west-facing unit at the Five Twenty, with a fireplace, hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows and eat-in kitchen.

Just east on Montana is a high-end business district filled with boutiques, cafés, a cheese shop and an embarrassment of frozen dessert riches — Menchie's, Pinkberry and Italian ice only steps from one another.

From his home on Montana Avenue, it's 22 miles and almost an hour's drive with traffic to Edwin Markham Middle School in mostly Latino and largely low-income Watts. The school is not far from L.A.'s largest housing projects, Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens, home to the rival Grape Street Crips and Bounty Hunter Bloods.

In 2007 there were 1,600 students at Markham. For decades the school ranked among the lowest-performing in the state, defeating all attempts to fix it. Shortly after Merman's 2008 murder, in a last-ditch effort to turn Markham around, the entire teaching staff was dismissed and replaced by new teachers and administrators selected by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's reformist Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.

Merman started there in 2001. In 2002, an errant blood clot put Merman's uncle Michael, the closest thing he had to a father, on a ventilator. Michael Merman passed away in a matter of days.

The Soviet immigrant had been a successful computer engineer. Michael Merman held five patents and helped design the interface for ATMs at Citibank. When his nephew Sasha was 7, Michael invited the boy and his mother to join him in L.A.

But for five years, the Soviets refused to let Sofia Merman leave. She worked at a children's center, caring for the offspring of atomic researchers. The paranoid Soviets suspected she might "know" things. She received a visit from the KGB. "They were very nice," she says, but they said she should think twice about moving to the United States.

But Sofia Merman was worried about her son's safety. Anti-Semitism in Moscow was rampant, anti-Israeli propaganda was common, and they were Jewish. In addition, Sasha had a dark complexion, so Muscovites might assume he was from the Caucasus region and come down hard on him for that.

"If not for this, they will kill him for that," she remembers thinking. So in 1985, when Sasha was 12, they moved to America, into a modest apartment in a heavily Russian-immigrant neighborhood in West Hollywood, where she still lives.

Sasha attended Fairfax High, made friends and later joined the U.S. Navy. He used his GI money to study illustration at Otis College of Art and Design.

A fan of surrealism, he showed great promise. Yet even after he received formal training at this top school, Merman's favorite tools were simple: a pen and a napkin.

"He would take just regular napkins, restaurant napkins, and a black felt-tip pen," recalls Milla Goldenberg, a former girlfriend of Merman's, "and just kind of doodle on a napkin. And he would come up with these amazing creations — just an outpouring of whatever was in his head, a stream of consciousness onto the napkin."

Using digital tools, Merman would layer elements from those pen-and-ink images onto color-saturated fantasy landscapes featuring an ice floe, a desert or a rainforest.

When Michael Merman died suddenly in 2002, he left everything — including the gorgeous Santa Monica condo — to Sofia and Sasha. Sasha moved in and began driving daily from the upscale world of Montana Avenue to Markham Middle School in Watts — where he met Daniel Becerril.