Murder on Montana Ave.

"When people get into fights, the stabbing can be in any position available," says Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally known forensic pathologist and a former New York City chief medical examiner. He says it appears that "whoever did this stabbed him in the back of the neck, which may have caused him to fall down, and get more stab wounds."

What is odd, Baden says, is the face-up position in which he was found, lying atop a bloody towel. "If he was found supine — face up — that means whoever did this turned him over."

Rebekah Becerril

Abram Guajardo

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More About

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

No one heard a thing. Yet the condo's hardwood floors often reverberated below. Sometimes at night, when Elliott still lived there, the neighbors would complain that the couple's footsteps were too loud. "My question is how they didn't hear that fight," she says.

Elliott wonders if things might have been different had she still lived on Montana with Merman. They'd had a dog — maybe it could have protected him. He is a Labrador, Elliott says, "but, you know, mix. He is from shelter. He has little bit of pit bull."

His mother wonders, too, if she could have prevented the tragedy. Sofia was supposed to be there that afternoon, but she says, "I was sick. I have a temperature. If not the situation, I would have been there."

The day after the horrified manager discovered Merman's body, Santa Monica police contacted Elliott. When they said they were calling about her ex-boyfriend's death, she hung up on them.

"I didn't believe it. I thought it was somebody joking in a bad way and I hung up at first. I said, 'I don't get that stupid joke.' And they called back," Elliott says.

She met with two detectives that evening, and the pair asked a lot of questions about Daniel Becerril, AP Financial Group and her ex-boyfriend's financial dealings.

The Sunday after his body was discovered, Merman's hockey team, the Fight'in Squirrels based in Westminster, had a moment of silence for "the Russian Rocket" before the game. Then the team attended his funeral and presented his mother with his jersey. Students from Markham, some of whom had lost neighbors and friends to violence in Watts but never a teacher, handed Sofia Merman poems and an oversize laminated card filled with condolences.

In the casket, Merman didn't look like himself. His face was puffed up from the multiple knife wounds to the back of his head. "The day of the funeral, I couldn't even ..." Elliott hesitates. "My friends were next to me because it was scary to look at him. It was blown up, like two times bigger, his face."

At the funeral, those closest to Merman couldn't help but think about Sasha's mounting frustrations with his sketchy financial planner. Amid the marble sculptures and manicured lawns at Hollywood Forever, the mourners asked one another: Could Daniel Becerril be responsible for forcing Sofia Merman to bury her son?

Norm Savage, a Fight'in Squirrel teammate, says, "Immediately after his funeral, his good friend who helped organize everything — since his mother was so distraught — he asked us, 'Do you know anybody by the name of Daniel?' "

Years went by before anyone close to Merman would hear of any movement on the case by Santa Monica detectives.

Police contacted Elliott in the summer of 2010. Two years had elapsed. They played her five phone calls recorded by a bank and asked if the voice, which claimed to be Sasha Merman, was in fact his. Elliott told the cops that three of the five calls were not Sasha Merman's voice.

This time, Elliott had a couple of questions for the detectives. "I was asking them, 'What's going on? When will they find somebody?' " she remembers. "But they never said. They said they were in the process; they almost know; they need more time."

It took two years after that for Santa Monica police to arrest Daniel Becerril on suspicion of murder. And in the four years SMPD spent working the case, an investigation by FINRA shows, it appears Becerril continued to scam unwitting AP Financial clients with impunity.

Becerril seems to have been thwarted not so much by law enforcement but, at least in part, by a persistent woman identified in documents from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority as simply "CB."

In December 2008, CB gave Becerril $11,500 to invest for her. She asked for paperwork verifying her investments but, over several months, he repeatedly failed to provide it. She gave him an ultimatum: Return my money or I'll file a complaint. CB did get her money back, finally, but she reported Becerril to FINRA nonetheless.

Her allegations led to a hearing in 2009. FINRA, which can take years to gather facts if the targets of its investigations refuse to cooperate, did not file a formal complaint against Becerril until more than a year later, in late 2010. Finally, on Feb. 23, 2012, FINRA barred Becerril from the financial industry.

Within one week of FINRA's action, the Santa Monica Police Department's slow-paced investigation, which had left friends and family at a loss, suddenly lurched forward. Police arrested Becerril on suspicion of murder.