WASHED UP
J
anuary 29, 2005, was the last day that Luis Salinas was a free man. It was his day off from his warehouse job at the Smart & Final distribution center in the City of Commerce. He spent most of the day with his sister and her two kids, looking for a new car to replace his fuel-guzzling, V8-powered 1984 Cadillac Eldorado.
Later that evening, 19-year-old Luis drove down to Witmer Street, a mile-long, densely populated street that zigzags north-to-south through Westlake, the neighborhood that he grew up in. At the time, Witmer Street between 3rd and 6th Streets was considered Rockwood gang territory, the gang that Luis joined as a young teen but had since been jumped out of. He was on his way to meet a girl that he wanted to hook up with named Betty Fabella.
It was a typical Friday night. Up and down Witmer Street, dozens of guys from “the neighborhood” posted up in front of early 20th century apartments and bungalows. People drank beers and partied in the street, while “lookouts” standing on the Spanish-style rooftops and balconies of buildings kept an eye out for any suspicious activity.
Luis was “dead sober” when he pulled up to an apartment building near Witmer and 3rd Street that evening. He had work the following morning so he planned on having an early night. But before he knew it, it was after 2 o’clock in the morning and he was doing lines of cocaine to try to stay awake.
Luis and Betty were sitting in his car, parked in a driveway between two apartment buildings, drinking Coronas while listening to music on the radio, when suddenly they heard two gunshots back-to-back.
“My first instinct told me it was a drive-by,” Luis tells L.A. TACO over a prison telephone in an unmistakable L.A. accent. He’s got a shaved head, tattoos on his neck, arms, and stomach, and a handlebar mustache that has gotten scruffier over the 20+ years that he’s been locked up.
Editor’s note: This is Luis’ version of events based on court records and interviews.
The sound of gunshots reverberated down the long, narrow street and caught the ears of four Los Angeles police officers standing outside of Good Samaritan Hospital hundreds of feet away from the shooting. The officers got in their patrol vehicles and began driving towards the sound of the gunshots. About 45 seconds later, an officer reportedly saw Luis’ brown Cadillac on Witmer Street.
Luis didn’t think much of the gunshots. At the time, there was a “full blown war” raging between the various gangs in Westlake. Shootings, particularly drive-bys, were an “everyday activity,” according to Luis. Earlier that same week, during the middle of the day, he nearly had his “head blown off” on Witmer Street by a group of gang members.
Scared, Betty ran into a nearby building after hearing the gunfire, while Luis remained by his car. A white extra-cab Chevy S10 pickup truck then sped down the street past him. He ducked down as it drove by.
“To me it was just another drive-by on a Friday night,” Luis says.
Sitting back in his car, Luis saw 23-year-old Hector Cuellar, an acquaintance from “the neighborhood” that he grew up with, run up to his passenger side door.
“Get me out of here,” Hector told Luis after he opened the car door and jumped in the passenger seat without invitation.
Luis hesitated at first. He was waiting for Betty and didn’t want to take off without her. But Hector was being persistent.
“This whole time I'm thinking this fool’s probably scared,” Luis says.
“Hurry up, let’s go,” Hector said three or four times before Luis fired up his Cadillac, pulled out of the driveway, and slowly drove towards 3rd Street.
Like Luis, Hector was intimately familiar with Witmer Street.
“I lived on that street, grew up on that street, and I was shot by rivals on that street,” Hector told a private investigator during an interview in 2022.
At the time of the shooting, Hector was living in a multi-story apartment building on Witmer with his parents. For as long as he could remember, Witmer Street had always been “very dangerous.”
Shootings and gang activity—which Hector “unfortunately” became a part of—were common. He’d witnessed rivals come into “the neighborhood” and kill his friends. That week alone, there had already been “several shootings,” he said.
Hector carried a stainless steel .38 Special revolver on him that night for “self-defense” purposes, he told the investigator, according to court records.
“I was trying to avoid being the next victim on the block,” he said.
So on the night of the shooting, when William Tovar, a Mara Salvatrucha gang member, drove past Hector on Witmer Street in a Chevy S10, then backed up in reverse, and seemingly reached for something in the passenger seat, Hector thought his life was at risk.
“I saw him reach towards the passenger side [seat],” Hector recalled. “It was dark and I did not know what he was doing . . . Nobody is going to stop like that on [Witmer Street], hit reverse, and do all these maneuvers if they mean well.”
In reality though, William was just looking for a parking spot.
Similar to Hector and Luis, William had been drinking that night. It was his birthday weekend and he “wanted to get wasted,” he later recalled in a signed 2023 declaration.
Before he crossed paths with Hector, William and his friend Angel had just come back from a beer run and were in his apartment on Witmer Street drinking Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor and smoking rock cocaine when they heard a car horn honking and remembered that Angel’s Chevy S10 was blocking a driveway, according to William’s signed declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition. So they ran downstairs to move the truck.
“Where you from?” William recalled Hector asking him, as he attempted to squeeze into a tight parking spot on Witmer Street.
“La Mara Salvatrucha!” William responded emphatically.
“Fuck Mara!” William remembered Hector saying before Hector pulled the .38 Special from his waistband and fired off a round, according to William’s signed declaration.
Hector had no intention of killing William that night.
“I only shot to protect myself,” he said.
William’s eyes “locked on the gun,” as Hector fired, William remembered. “I’m just staring at the gun. It’s a small revolver, stainless steel,” he said.
After being shot in the left leg, William threw the truck in reverse, then froze for a couple seconds before putting the truck in drive. As he sped towards Hector, Hector fired off another round at him through the truck’s windshield.
After the shooting, Hector took off running down Witmer towards 3rd Street.
“I remember hearing two gunshots back-to-back,” said Ignacio Bautista, a friend of Luis’ who heard the shooting from a nearby rooftop overlooking Witmer Street, in a signed 2024 declaration filed in court with Luis’ habeas petition. “And I remember seeing a car driving fast up the street towards 3rd [Street] . . . I thought the car just lit up one of the homies on the block.”
Earlier that evening, Ignacio, Betty, and Luis had all shared some beers together before Luis and Betty went to Luis’ car and Ignacio and the rest of the group went up to a rooftop overlooking Witmer to hang out.
“Witmer was always really active so we would always kick back in the hallways or the rooftops of the buildings so we weren’t sitting ducks when the enemies came in blasting,” Ignacio explained in his declaration.
After hearing the gunshots, Ignacio recalled seeing Hector, whom he also knew from “the neighborhood,” run towards 3rd Street while “grabbing at his waist like he had a gun.”
“The whole ‘hood knows what really happened that night,” he said. “Luis got caught up in some shit he had nothing to do with and ended up taking that fall for it and getting washed up.”
Ignacio’s recollection of the shooting was corroborated by Michael “Stalks” Garcia, another person whom Luis knew from “the neighborhood,” who was with Ignacio at the time of the shooting.
“I remember hearing two gunshots back-to-back,” Michael said in an unsigned 2024 declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition. Afterwards, Michael remembered looking down at the street and seeing Luis' car, Betty running into the apartment building, and then “a car” racing down Witmer Street.
“I thought the car just did a drive-by,” he continued.
Then he saw Hector running towards 3rd Street.
“I saw [Hector] jump in the car,” Michael confirmed. “Then Luis pulled out of the driveway and went up 3rd Street.”
After the shooting, with Hector in his car, Luis drove a short distance down Witmer Street then turned right on 3rd Street. As he drove down 3rd towards Downtown he noticed an LAPD patrol car tailing him. When he pulled over to the curb and tried to let Hector out near Belmont High School, the officers following him flashed a bright spotlight into his car.
At first, Luis wasn't too concerned about the officers behind him. He was driving under the influence but had no idea that Hector was connected to the shooting that he just heard. But when Hector began pressuring him to drive off, he panicked.
“I just kind of panicked, you know, like I had been drinking, so I was already thinking it’s gonna be all bad, because that’s pretty much what happens in that area,” Luis tells L.A. TACO. “Any kind of encounter with Rampart [Division], it’s always gonna be bad.”
Luis grew up in Westlake in the mid-to-late-1990s and early 2000s, during the infamous Rampart CRASH Unit scandal.
CRASH stood for “Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.” But in many ways, Rampart CRASH Unit officers behaved much like the gangs that they were tasked with policing. They had matching skull tattoos, wore Rampart Division patches on their clothes while off-duty, and engaged in drug trafficking, robberies, and even attempted murder.
At the center of the scandal was former LAPD Rampart Division Officer Rafael Perez, who after being caught stealing cocaine from an evidence room in 1998, agreed to testify against other corrupt officers.
“We vaguely sensed we were doing the wrong things for the right reasons,” a tearful Rafael Perez said in a statement in court before he was sentenced to five years in prison.
Perez would go on to reportedly be one of the main inspirations behind Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance in the 2001 David Ayers film, “Training Day,” which was written before the Rampart Scandal.
During a federal investigation into Rampart Division, Perez told authorities that officers in the station’s anti-gang CRASH Unit regularly beat and framed suspects, as well as covered up unjustified police shootings. The scandal resulted in more than 100 criminal convictions being overturned and dozens of lawsuits.
Luis’ first encounter with Rampart Division officers came when he was only around 11-years-old, he says.
“They grabbed me, they threw me up against the fence, and they put my hands behind my back, and then [started] twisting my fingers,” Luis recalls. “They're pushing [them] all the way back, you know, talking about they're gonna break my finger and shit, asking me where do I live?”
After the officers realized Luis was a minor in that incident, they asked him for his address and drove him home, he says.
On another occasion, a few years later, Rampart Division officers allegedly planted a gun on him, which resulted in him being arrested and sent off to “juvenile hall.”
“It all came from these fools planting a gun on me,” Luis says.
(A spokesperson for the department declined to comment on Luis’ allegations due to on-going litigation.)
Rampart Division officers were known back then for taking people’s guns and drugs without arresting them and then dumping the person in rival gang territory, according to Luis.
“The main thing was they weren’t really arresting you. Ninety-nine percent of the time they’re fucking you up, and they’re taking whatever you got, and then they’re leaving you,” he says.
In March of 2005, a couple months after William was shot, the city announced that it had settled nearly all of the remaining lawsuits stemming from the scandal, totaling more than $70 million in payouts.
Despite the historic settlements and overturned convictions, many people believe that the Rampart Scandal only scratched the surface of corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department.
“The net result is the city got these settlements without letting the truth come out,” an attorney who secured nearly $20 million in settlements for his clients in Rampart-related cases told the Los Angeles Times.
“Could never understand the lack of coverage and investigations into the Rampart Scandal,” William Gude, a popular LAPD critic who goes by Film The Police L.A., tells L.A. TACO. “The worst players ended up being rewarded.”
After the city settled most of the lawsuits, then-Police Chief William Bratton admitted that he suspected that some problematic Rampart Division officers likely remained on the job.
“Knowing is not necessarily proving,” he told the Times.
In more recent years, the LAPD has been dealing with another gang-related scandal, this time centered around allegations that San Fernando Valley-based LAPD officers assigned to a specialized gang unit made unconstitutional traffic stops without documenting them in a practice known as a “ghost stop.”
“The culture never changed,” Luis tells L.A. TACO from prison.
While being pursued by the police with Hector in his passenger seat, Luis blew through multiple stop signs and a couple traffic lights at speeds at over 60 MPH, according to police investigators. (In his habeas petition, Luis’ attorneys argue that he did not exceed 60 MPH).
The pursuit ended with Luis losing control of his car and slamming into a barrier near the corner of Temple Street and Glendale Boulevard, near the Echo Park Tennis Courts. After the crash, Hector remained in the car while Luis jumped out of the totalled Eldorado with his hands up.
“My first instinct is, they're going to shoot me,” Luis recalls. “[So I] put my hands up and show them that I don't got nothing, like there's no reason for them to shoot me.”
According to the arresting officers, Luis ignored commands to get on the ground and took a “combative stance” while he cursed at them.
Officers approached Luis with their guns drawn and threw him to the ground, Luis remembers.
“They started fucking me up, punching me, kicking me,” he recalls.
Eventually, the officers placed him in handcuffs and “hogtied” him, so his legs were tied to his hands. Then they threw him in the back of a patrol car and went after Hector.
Watching from the back of the patrol car on his stomach, Luis saw the officers drag Hector out of the car. They began brutally punching and kicking him until his face was bloody, according to Luis and a signed declaration from Hector filed with Luis’ habeas petition.
“You should have come out shooting motherfucker, you fucking pussy,” the officers yelled at him, according to Hector.
“I lost complete consciousness,” Hector said. “When I woke up, I was hogtied in the back of a police car with my hands tied behind my back to my legs.”
Meanwhile, back in “the neighborhood," feeling numb from the waist down after being shot twice on Witmer Street, William circled the block in Angel’s pickup truck looking for his friend.
Then the cops pulled him over.
With their guns drawn, officers screamed at William to get out of the truck.
“I’ve been shot! I can’t get out,” William yelled back at the officers.
The officers helped William out of the truck and moved him onto the sidewalk where he began throwing up.
“These cops didn’t care,” William said in his 2023 signed declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition. “They didn’t try to stop the bleeding or treat my wounds. I feel like they wanted me to die. They just stood there watching me lay there in pain, dying.”
William begged the officers to take him to the hospital, which was just down the street, but the officers insisted on waiting for an ambulance, he said.
“They’re telling me I look bad, that I’m not going to make it, I’m probably going to die,” he recalled.
When he asked to use one of the officer’s cell phones to say “goodbye,” an officer responded, “We don’t do that.”
The pain was so intense, William started feeling dizzy and began going “in-and-out of consciousness,” he remembered. Then the police put a white sheet over him. As if he was already dead.
After what felt like “forever,” an ambulance finally arrived.
“I kept telling [the paramedics] ‘what are you waiting for? Let's go!! Get me outta here, I’m dying!’” William recalled.
While paramedics were treating him inside the ambulance, an LAPD officer approached William and told him: “We got the guy who shot you, we’re bringing him over.”
After being beaten and arrested, Luis was transported in a patrol car back near Witmer and 3rd Street, where the ambulance was, according to the district attorney’s response to Luis’ habeas petition. Still hogtied, officers pulled him out of the car.
From her apartment balcony overlooking 3rd Street, Rosa Flores watched as Luis stood near the patrol car.
“When I get out of the car . . . they tell me to stand in front of the car. So I take a couple little, like, bunny hops . . . because I can't walk,” Luis explains. But within a matter of seconds, he was put back into the patrol car, he says.
During Luis’ trial, Flores testified she never saw officers point their flashlights at Luis and they never opened the doors to the ambulance that William was in.
“I hear them specifically say, ‘It's too late. It's too late, get them out of here,” Luis recalls in vivid detail.
Looking through a small window on the side of the ambulance no larger than a couple of feet, under intense pain and without his glasses, William identified Luis as the shooter.
“I never saw a guy,” William confessed to a private investigator years after the shooting. “I didn’t see what he was wearing, I could barely see a shadow.”
“I’m pissed off, I want revenge, so I just say, ‘Yeah that’s him, that's the muthafucker who shot me!’”
“It was a lie,” William admitted in his signed declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition. “I just said that out of anger and desperation so I could leave already. The police wouldn’t let the ambulance take me to the hospital.”
Despite being arrested with Luis, Hector was never presented to William for identification, apparently because paramedics told police that he “was not in a good condition and they needed to leave the scene.”
Afterwards, William was transported to a local hospital and admitted into surgery. There, a doctor told him that one of the bullets that he was hit with went “in and out” while the other bullet remained lodged in his left hip. The doctor didn’t want to “make another cut,” so they left the bullet inside of him, William recalled years later.
“He said the bullet was a .38,” William said.
From Witmer Street, Luis was transported to the infamous Rampart Division Police Station on Temple Street, a block west of Rampart Boulevard in what is now known as Historic Filipinotown. At first he thought he’d been arrested for evading the police and driving under the influence. But when the police started asking questions about a gun, he grew confused.
Even then, however, Luis didn’t know that those two gun shots that he heard while he was in his car with Betty were the reason why he was in custody.
After a brief stint at Rampart Station, Luis was transported down the street to “The Glass House,” the LAPD’s Metropolitan Detention Center in Downtown Los Angeles, where he found out he was being charged with attempted murder.
Like Luis, Hector was also arrested for attempted murder, but on February 1, a day after the shooting, he received some good news.
“He got released,” Luis says.
To this day, Luis doesn’t know exactly why prosecutors didn’t file a case against Hector. But he thinks it had something to do with the fact that the police beat him up so badly. He also thinks there was a lack of evidence to charge either one of them.
A spokesperson for the D.A.’s Gang Homicide Unit told L.A. TACO that they could not locate any written record of why prosecutors declined to charge Hector more than 20 years ago.
“My office policy is to keep and store paper reject forms for only two years,” Assistant Head Deputy Frank Santoro told L.A. TACO. “They are destroyed after that.”
After allegedly being beaten unconscious by the police, Hector filed an Internal Affairs complaint with the LAPD against the officers who he believed assaulted him. The LAPD followed up with Luis about the complaint, but nothing seemed to come of it.
“Internal Affairs came, pulled me out [of my cell], asked me a bunch of questions [and] showed me a bunch of pictures,” Luis remembers. But neither he nor Hector could confidently identify the officers that beat them up at the time
“I didn't want to just fucking lie,” Luis admits.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department declined to comment on the Internal Affairs investigation.
After being released from jail, Hector went to see Walter Gonzalez, a friend of Luis’ who owned a tattoo shop called Lethal 79 on Whittier Boulevard and Garfield Street in Montebello.
“Hector came and told me what happened and that he was the one who fired the gun and shot the guy,” Walter said in a signed declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition in March of 2025. Shortly after that, Hector left Los Angeles in fear that he would get arrested again for the shooting.
The day after Hector came by to see him, Walter and some friends got together to raise bail money for Luis.
“I know for a fact that if Luis knew what Hector had just done, he wouldn’t have given Hector a ride,” Walter said. “It was an innocent mistake, he was just trying to help his friend get from point A to point B without knowing the details of the incident that just occured.”
A couple weeks later, Walter and two of Luis’ other friends showed up at his sister Irma’s house with the money that they raised.
“They told me they were upset that the police let the other guy go and kept my brother, when they knew the other guy who was arrested with my brother was the actual shooter,” Irma said in a signed 2024 declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition.
Sometime after Walter showed up on her doorstep, Irma and Luis’ father, Salvador Salinas, went to visit Luis at Men’s Central Jail, the troubled Downtown jail facility that years later would be at the center of another federal investigation. There, they revealed to Luis that Hector was responsible for the shooting.
“He was surprised by the information,” Irma remembered. “He was upset.”
“He just kept saying ‘the cops will figure it out,” she said. “The cops will figure it out.”
LIFE
During the chilly early-morning hours after the shooting, LAPD Officer James Muniz and his partner, Officer Kristine Shanahan, were searching through Luis’ Cadillac Eldorado when they came across loose .44 caliber bullets scattered inside the car’s trunk and interior. As well as two boxes of Remington .44 Magnum bullets.
Back near Witmer and 3rd Street, police found Angel’s Chevy S10 with a bullet hole through its windshield. When LAPD Officer Richard Platzner opened the driver side door and separated the door panel from the metal door, a spent bullet that was later determined to be a .38 or .357 caliber round fell to the pavement. On the floorboard of the truck, Platzner found a fragment of another bullet that was initially believed to be a .40 caliber or a 10mm round.
Outside of 420 Witmer Street—the apartment building where William lived and was shot—LAPD Officer Thomas Andreas recovered a .44 Magnum bullet casing from a “gutter” on the sidewalk.
Despite not filing charges against Hector, the prosecution argued during trial that William was shot with two different types of firearms that were never recovered: a revolver and a semi-automatic firearm.
On the day that Luis’ first trial began, the bullet fragment that was found on the floorboard of Angel’s truck was reanalyzed by LAPD Officer Rafael Garcia, because the criminalist that originally analyzed the bullet fragment was on vacation, according to a trial transcript of Garcia’s testimony.
At the 11th hour, Garcia determined that the bullet fragment that was originally determined to either be a .40 caliber round or a 10mm bullet could also be a .44 caliber round.
The prosecution connected Luis to the alleged semi-automatic firearm through the .44 caliber ammunition that was found in his car, which was the same caliber and made by the same manufacturer as the shell casing found in the “gutter.”
Luis’ first trial ended with a hung jury. After more than a week of deliberations, the jury was deadlocked 11-to-1 in favor of convicting Luis.
“I thought I was going home,” Luis says. “And I was happy with [a] hung jury even [though] I wanted the win.”
But during his second trial, that sense of optimism went away.
“There was just a bunch of things, a bunch of things man, that right off the bat told me I was fucked,” Luis says.
Luis’ second trial ended with a jury convicting him of attempted murder in less than an hour, with the judge sentencing him to 44-years-to-life in prison. Nine years for attempted murder. Ten years due to gang enhancements due to his alleged association with Rockwood gang. And 25-years-to-life from gun enhancements.
Luis remembers hearing the sound of his family crying after the verdict was read.
“That’s when it hit me man,” he says.
Afterwards, Luis started to tear up.
“Don’t worry. Don’t worry, I’ll be back,” he promised his family. “I’m gonna come back.”
But to himself, he thought: “Fuck, it’s a wrap . . . it’s over.”
Growing up in Westlake during the ‘90s, Luis was taught from a young age that beating a case for somebody like him was next to impossible, even if you’re innocent.
“We grew up knowing that the system is rigged, that no matter what, we're fucked, you know,” Luis says.
Luis wasn’t the only person who felt let down by the so-called “criminal justice system.”
“To this day it really gets me mad how they treated me,” William said in a signed 2023 declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition, nearly two decades after he was shot. “They never cared about me or my family. They just wanted to use me.”
After being shot twice and nearly dying, William told a prosecutor at the D.A.’s office that he didn’t want to be involved in the case because he couldn’t identify the shooter.
“I told him I never got a clear view of his face,” he said.
The prosecutor responded by threatening to violate William’s probation so that he would be in custody during Luis’ trial, and therefore, would be “forced to go to court,“ according to William.
“They said I had to cooperate,” William explained in his declaration. “They said they could easily violate my probation and lock me up. They threatened me.”
The prosecutor told William they “wouldn’t protect him” if he didn’t cooperate, William recalled.
“I told him I don’t need your protection, I will be fine,” he said.
Like Luis, William grew up in Westlake during the Rampart CRASH Unit Scandal.
“Everyone knows how corrupt and how crooked they have been,” he said. “Me and my friends grew up getting messed with by CRASH.”
After being shot, William didn’t want to talk about the shooting or even think about it, he said. But he also didn’t want to create more problems for himself.
“The D.A. and the Rampart officers involved in the case kept pressuring me, forcing me, and intimidating me, trying to tell me what to say, putting words in my mouth,” he said in his declaration.
“All I wanted was to forget all about this,” he continued. “I didn’t want more problems with [the] Rampart gang unit. I knew they would mess with me if they wanted to.”
So William did what prosecutors wanted him to do.
“I didn’t want to be locked up, I didn’t want to get messed up by the cops,” he said. “I just wanted to move on and take care of myself and my family.”
At trial, William was visibly angry during his testimony. He wasn’t “fully cooperative” with prosecutors, according to his declaration, and he declined to identify Luis as the shooter.
“The majority of my answers were, ‘I don’t remember,’” he said.
Prosecutors attributed William’s reluctance to testify to gang politics and a fear of being labeled a “snitch.” During the second trial, they also claimed that Rockwood gang members had approached him multiple times and intimidated him in an effort to discourage him from testifying.
During trial, the prosecution relied heavily on a statement that William made to police when he was in the back of the ambulance fighting for his life.
“That’s him. That’s him. That’s the motherfucker who shot me,” William reportedly told police.
“These words, uttered by [William] while bleeding out in the back of an ambulance and fearing he would die, became the cornerstone of Salinas’s wrongful conviction,” Luis’ attorney argued in his habeas petition.
When Luis’ defense attorney presented evidence at trial that showed William failed to identify Luis during another lineup, three months after the shooting, the prosecution suggested that William was scared to identify Luis then because he feared being labeled “a snitch.”
According to LAPD Officer Todd Turner, the prosecution’s “gang expert” in Luis’ case, who began their career as a Rampart Division CRASH Unit officer the same year Perez was busted, the worst thing you can be labeled in gang culture is a “snitch.” During Luis’ trial, Turner testified that gang members who were suspected of being “snitches” faced retaliation from the Mexican Mafia, a notorious prison gang.
Prosecutors pointed to a conversation between William and Danny Arrona—a former LAPD detective who currently sells Rampart Division stickers and street signs—that supposedly happened a week and a half after the shooting, during which William allegedly told Detective Arrona that Rockwood gang members showed up to the Witmer Street apartment where he lived.
“That’s where he lives,” a gang member reportedly said while pointing at William’s apartment.
During Luis’ trial, prosecutors also claimed that shortly before the second trial, a deputy district attorney allegedly overheard William tell another prosecutor that he had been approached by Rockwood gang members on multiple occasions while he was in jail.
The first time, they allegedly asked him if he was the victim in the shooting that Luis was accused of committing, according to the D.A.’s office. The second time, a handwritten message (known as a “kite”) from Luis was allegedly delivered to William’s cell.
But according to William, none of this ever happened.
“The D.A. lied about interviewing me with another D.A. and that I told him I was scared to snitch in court,” he said in a sworn statement filed with Luis’ habeas petition. William denied that he had been approached by gang members from Rockwood or that he received “a kite” from Luis.
“Where’s the recordings of me saying any of that to the D.A?” William questioned. “It never happened, they lied about that.”
“I never said any of that stuff,” he said.
William added that while he was in county jail, he never had any issues with other detainees.
“I was never scared anything would happen to me. I was never threatened by anyone from Rockwood and I never received a letter from Luis while in county jail,” he said.
William also noted that he lived on Witmer Street before and after he was shot and he “never had any issues with anyone.”
Luis denies that he sent William a “kite” or intimidated him. He points out that the D.A.’s office did not offer any specific details about what the alleged “kite” said or when the supposed altercations with Rockwood gang members occurred. He also wonders why investigators didn’t record these alleged confessions made by William.
Growing up in Westlake during the late ‘90s and early 2000s, joining a gang was a means for survival, Luis says. When he was just 11-years-old, Luis was jumped into the Rockwood Street gang. Eventually he got the word “ROCKWOOD” tattooed across his belly.
“[Gang life] was a part of me, like, that's all I knew, and I was proud of it,” Luis tells L.A. TACO. “[But] I always thought of a future, you know? I always thought, ‘I'm moving past this.’”
The loss of Luis’ friend Magin “Mago” Munoz in September of 2003 became a turning point for Luis. Shortly after Magin died, Luis decided to leave gang life behind him.
“Luis showed up to the ‘hood and asked if he could walk away or get jumped out because he was doing good,” Rockwood gangmember Eliseo “Dinky” German confirmed in a signed 2024 declaration filed with Luis’ 2025 habeas petition. “[He] didn’t want to feel obligated to participate in meetings or what not . . . and just wanted to move forward with his life without any issues.”
At that point, Luis was living in Riverside with his mom. He was enrolled in community college and had secured a job with a construction company.
“We respected his courage to confront us straight up,” Eliseo said. “But mainly, he was doing good.”
“It was admirable,” he added.
Most of the people who jumped Luis into Rockwood when he was just a kid jumped him out of the gang the same year he became a legal adult, Eliseo remembered. This was nearly two years before William was shot.
After the shooting, Eliseo found out that Luis had been arrested.
“It was well known throughout our ‘hood that Hector was the one responsible for this, not Luis,” he said in his declaration filed with Luis’ habeas petition.
“Eventually I heard that Hector had gotten released but Luis had not,” Eliseo said. “That shook a lot of heads in our [gang].”
In their habeas petition, Luis’ attorneys argued that LAPD Officer Todd Turner, the “gang expert” who testified during Luis’ trial, “had no personal knowledge of [Luis] being an active gang member of the Rockwood Street gang” at the time of the shooting. And that Luis’ inclusion in a gang database that was “plagued by factual inaccuracies” and the tattoos on his body did not make him an active gang member at the time of the shooting.
A spokesperson for the LAPD declined to comment on our reporting due to “ongoing court proceedings.”
“Given the pending litigation, the Los Angeles Police Department will not be commenting on the specific allegations or disputed facts referenced in your inquiry,” the spokesperson said in a statement to L.A. TACO.
Without William’s questionable identification of Luis as the shooter and the “gang expert’s” testimony, Luis’ attorneys believe he would have never been convicted of attempted murder.
‘I’VE HAD SO MANY DREAMS ABOUT THAT NIGHT’
“After I was shot, I left the gang life,” William said. “I changed my life. It really opened my eyes and made me realize my family is what’s really important.”
Getting shot gave him a second chance, he said. He eventually got a job and moved far away from “the neighborhood.”
For 18 years, William had thought deeply about that late-January night in 2005 when his life almost ended.
“I’ve had so many dreams about that night,” he said in 2023. “I have tried to remember as much as I possibly can about exactly what happened the night I was shot.”
William feels awful that Luis has been in prison for so long.
“I put myself in his shoes,” he said. “It could just easily be me locked up. It’s not right.”
One day a few years ago, William decided to make things right.
“I’m going to help by getting the surgery and having the bullet removed [from my leg], so it can be used in Luis' case,” he said.
“I hope this bullet will make everything clear,” said William.
A CONFESSION AND A BULLET
Luis’ first instinct after he was sentenced to life in prison was to cut everybody off.
He had fallen into a depression and ended up going to “the hole” (solitary confinement). Then he met an 18th Street gang member who, after 20 years on death row, had recently experienced a small victory.
“Don't trip man, don't lose faith,” he told Luis. “I've been on death row for 20 years, and I just got called back down.”
When Luis was moved from county jail to prison in early June of 2006, his mindset started to change.
“Right away . . . I started getting into the law library,” he says. “I started doing everything I possibly could on my own because I knew that, you know, nobody else was going to help me.”
Early on, Luis' focus was always on obtaining new physical evidence in his case. For one, “there’s no denying” physical evidence, he says.
But also, he never expected that people would come out of the shadows to speak up on his behalf. Not because they were afraid to, but because the people he surrounded himself with had a general lack of trust for the so-called “justice system.”
“Most people grow up with the mentality of, you know, ‘fuck these cops, man, fuck the system,’ because they've been fucking [with] us our whole lives,” he says. “That's just the way you grow up. So you don’t trust them, because they've never given you a reason to trust them."
Instead of focusing on witnesses, Luis zeroed in on the bullet that was still lodged inside William’s left leg. Based on what Luis heard from people in “the neighborhood,” he believed that Hector had shot William with a .38 Special.
Hector was known to carry revolvers on him, according to Luis.
“That was his go-to gun,” he says. “That fool always had revolvers.”
Over a two-decade period, Luis and his family hired a series of attorneys and private investigators to uncover new evidence and file appeals on his behalf.
“If I was a guilty man, I wouldn't be wasting my family's money that they don't have,” he says.
But unfortunately, Luis’ family believes that many of the people that they entrusted and gave their hard-earned money to ended up taking advantage of them because the results that they produced did not match the dollar amounts that the family paid.
In one instance, Luis’ father used money from a legal settlement that he received after a driver nearly killed him while he was riding his bike to work, to hire Matthew Barhoma, a young attorney who focuses on post-conviction appellate cases.
Barhoma has a widow’s peak hairline, arched eyebrows, and a confident, closed-mouth smile. For a while, he appeared regularly as a legal analyst on Court TV, and his email signature once included the logos of Forbes, the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Fox News—news outlets he’s been featured in. He’s arguably best-known for his brief stint representing Tory Lanez, the Canadian rapper who was convicted in 2022 of shooting Megan Thee Stallion. In total, Barhoma charged Luis’ family approximately $50,000 in legal fees, according to Luis and invoices reviewed by L.A. TACO.
“We're thinking, ‘fuck, we're paying him $50,000, so for sure this guy's a good lawyer,’” Luis says. “For sure he's gonna get me out, you know?”
During the spring of 2021, Barhoma filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of Luis that was insufficient and riddled with blatant mistakes, according to Luis. In their response to the petition, prosecutors pointed out numerous issues including that every page had the same page number. Hector’s affidavit and William’s declaration were both unsigned and were not notarized.
An affidavit from Barhoma himself was also missing his signature and a notary’s signature and seal. Prosecutors also argued that Barhoma incorrectly claimed that evidence that had been brought up during trial was new evidence.
Judge Frederick N. Wapner, the trial judge in Luis’ case, similarly noted that William’s declaration did not present new evidence and Hector’s declaration was “undated, unsigned, unauthenticated, not made under the penalty of perjury, and untrustworthy.”
“I could have done a better job myself,” Luis says.
In addition to filing a habeas petition, Barhoma charged Luis’ family thousands of dollars to explore other post-conviction options.
An invoice from Barhoma addressed to Luis, reviewed by L.A. TACO, shows that Barhoma charged Luis almost $4,300 to “file and litigate” a “petition” with the D.A.’s Conviction Integrity Unit, the unit responsible for reviewing wrongful convictions.
In reality, however, any incarcerated person could request to have their sentence reviewed by filling out a simple application that’s available on the D.A.’s website.
“All it is is a piece of paper,” Luis’ brother Jorge explained. “Luis could fill [it] out himself. He filed one himself in 2016 and got denied. It's only a request for review.” (A December 5, 2016 letter sent to Luis, reviewed by L.A TACO, confirms that the District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit declined to review his case.)
This was during former District Attorney George Gascón's time in office, during which he relaunched the department that reviewed wrongful convictions. He renamed the unit the “Conviction Integrity Unit.”
Under Gascón, the criteria that prosecutors looked at to evaluate whether or not a case should be reviewed “drastically” expanded. By the end of his time as the top prosecutor in Los Angeles, Gascón helped free at least 14 people from prison who were wrongfully convicted, a spokesperson for the D.A. confirmed with L.A. TACO. And five people were resentenced through the CIU.
This marked a sharp increase from his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, who was known for her “tough on crime” approach to running the largest local prosecutorial agency in the country. Under Lacey, only three people were exonerated, and one person received a reduced sentence, The Appeal reported.
But to this day, dozens of people who filed to have their cases reexamined under Gascón are still waiting to find out if the current D.A. will support their release.
In 2024, Nathan Hochman, a career prosecutor with a bit of a resemblance to Harvey Dent, replaced former District Attorney George Gascón as the top prosecutor in Los Angeles. Shortly after being sworn into office, Hochman changed the name of the Conviction Integrity Unit back to the Justice Conviction Review Unit, its former name under Lacey.
“Which is really more reflective of what the work is about,” the head of the unit at the time, Martha Carrillo, told L.A. TACO in 2025. “Which is the review and investigation of actual innocence claims of individuals convicted of felonies who claim they are innocent yet wrongfully convicted.”
When Barhoma reached out to the Conviction Integrity Unit about Luis’ case in 2022, Carrillo disputed the facts in Luis’ case as described by Barhoma in an earlier email, telling him that they were “not inclined at this point to revisit” his case.
In a November 2022 email to Barhoma, reviewed by L.A. TACO, Carrillo specifically noted that Luis’ 2016 application had been denied and Barhoma had already filed a petition to have Luis resentenced under a penal code that allows people who’ve been convicted of murder to have their sentences reduced.
“. . . the CIU is not inclined, at this point, to revisit this claim, in view of the pending PC 1170.95 litigation and that fact that, as per Mr. Salinas' claim, his is a matter of less culpability, as opposed to actual innocence,” Carrillo wrote Barhoma.
When reached for comment, Barhoma noted in an email that he was held to strict confidentiality laws barring him “from discussing the specifics of any client matter.” Barhoma emphatically denied all of the allegations against him in this story and threatened to take legal action against L.A. TACO.
“You have now been placed on written notice, prior to publication, that these assertions are false,” Barhoma wrote. “I reserve all rights and remedies with respect to any publication containing false and defamatory statements about me or my firm.”
After Barhoma filed Luis’ habeas petition, a judge issued an order to show cause, but ultimately the petition was denied.
However, the pieces for a strong, amended petition were mostly there and through working with Barhoma, Luis’ family had hired Lisa De Benedittis, a private investigator, who was able to track down Betty, Hector, and William.
“The investigator finds Hector,” Luis recalls. “She gets a hold of him, talks to him, they do a recording, and he goes into detail about everything.”
“He said, ‘it was me. Luis had nothing to do with it . . . I had a .38, I did this, I did that’ . . . He lays it all out,” Luis remembers.
Nearly two decades after he was shot and just inches away from death, William agreed to have the bullet that was still lodged in his left leg removed.
On August 16, 2023, Doctor Renen Tellez at Kaiser Permanente Medical Fontana surgically removed the bullet from William’s left hip area.
Afterwards, nurse Shawn Roe collected the bullet, put it into a container, and then handed it over to Moses Castillo, a retired LAPD-detective-turned-private-investigator with a large social media following, who was hired by Luis’ family.
“It looks like it’s a .38 caliber,’” William told Castillo after the bullet was extracted.
Castillo measured the bullet, took photos of it, and then drove it to the new Rampart station on 6th Street in Westlake—across the street from the former 24-hour Pacific Dining Car—where he handed the extracted bullet to LAPD Officer Vanessa Vargas to be booked as evidence. The station sits just a block away from where William was shot in between what were two of the main outposts for the Rockwood Street gang.
Rather than pay another lawyer to file a petition, Luis figured it would make more sense to just hand over copies of the recording to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office.
After the bullet was submitted as evidence, Luis’ family began reaching out to Gascón’s Conviction Integrity Unit again, in hopes that they would look at the new evidence and reopen Luis’ case.
“We're calling the D.A.’s office. We're telling them, ‘Look, man, we got new evidence. Can you please review it?’” Luis remembers.
“They don't give a fuck, man, they don't say shit. They don't look into it, they don't ask about it,” he says. “Nothing.”
Fed up, Luis decided he was going to file an amended habeas petition himself. So he spent months researching and writing the petition until he was ready to file it. But before he did, he met a volunteer private investigator named Jessica Jacobs.
Through Jacobs, in June of 2024, Luis connected with The Innocence Center, one of the state’s most well-known law firms fighting to free wrongfully convicted people from prison.
The Innocence Center doesn’t represent just anybody.
It only represents clients, typically after an independent investigation that can take years to complete, that its staff is 100 percent confident are innocent, Michael Semanchik, executive director of The Innocence Center, told L.A. TACO in 2024.
With the help of Jacobs, The Innocence Center conducted an investigation and obtained more declarations from witnesses in Luis’ case. To Luis' surprise, people were willing to come out of the shadows to help him.
“I'm grateful for that,” he says.
Luis credits Lisa De Benedittis, the private investigator from earlier, who has a knack for getting people to talk, for securing the key declarations in his case. And he’s especially thankful to William for his willingness to help, despite the circumstances.
“Being a victim of a shooting like that, you know, you could easily be bitter,” Luis says.
But William has always shown that he’s drawn to the truth.
“He’s been the type of person that is like, ‘man, what's right is right, what's wrong is wrong,’” Luis tells L.A. TACO. “You know what I mean? Like, he knows that helping and doing that is the right thing to do.”
In May of 2025, The Innocence Center filed a more than 160-page habeas petition outlining all of the new evidence in Luis’ case. Less than a month later, in June of 2025, a judge ordered the D.A.’s office to explain why Luis should not be immediately released from prison.
Luis hoped that the order to show cause would motivate the D.A.’s office to approach The Innocence Center to work out some kind of “an agreement” to advocate for his release from prison, like they have in other cases.
“I thought they would concede,” he said.
But nearly a year after the order to show cause, he hadn’t heard a thing from the District Attorney’s Office.
“What the fuck does it take? What does it take, homie? What do I gotta do?” Luis pleads. “Like everything’s there. All the fucking evidence is there, and they still refuse to let me go.”
A day before the April 9 deadline, Luis finally got the response he had been waiting for for nearly a year. But not the response he had hoped for.
In a more than 80-page response to his habeas petition, the D.A.’s office picked apart Luis’ petition and asked a judge to deny his request for release without an evidentiary hearing.
Among their top arguments: they questioned why witnesses—some of them affiliates of the gang that Luis was alleged to be associated with—were coming forward nearly two decades after the shooting. And they highlighted inconsistencies between what a couple of witnesses said in their declarations versus what they said in more recent interviews with investigators.
For example, when an investigator with the D.A.’s office interviewed Betty within the last year, she couldn’t remember specific details about the night of the shooting and some of her statements contradicted what she said in her declaration, according to the district attorney’s response to Luis’ habeas petition.
During the interview, Betty told the investigator that she was home “by or before midnight”. But at trial, it was established by both the defense and prosecution that the shooting happened at around 3 o’clock in the morning.
The D.A.’s office also called into question the credibility of Ignacio, Luis’ friend who was on Witmer Street during the night of the shooting.
They pointed to a recent interview with an investigator with the D.A.’s office, during which he told them he was unwilling to testify under oath. During the interview, he also admitted that he didn’t know at the time if it was Hector whom he saw running down Witmer Street after the shooting.
Even if everything that Ignacio said was true, the D.A.’s office argued it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of Luis’ trial.
According to the D.A.’s office, there is no evidence that there was only one shooter. And they questioned if Hector would be willing to show up for a possible evidentiary hearing to give testimony, given that he had since been deported to Mexico, has an active warrant out for his arrest, according to the D.A’s office, and that testifying could lead to him being prosecuted for attempted murder, which could carry a sentence of 25-years-to-life in prison.
They also pointed out that William’s recantation was previously considered and denied in 2021 and 2022 petitions and that his declaration doesn’t prove that his testimony during trial was false, since he refused to identify Luis as the shooter at trial. Luis’ “meritless claims” are unproven and/or procedurally barred, the D.A.’s office concluded. And the court should deny his petition without an evidentiary hearing.
In late May, Luis’ attorney responded to the D.A.’s rebuttal.
In response to our reporting, Venusse D. Dunn, a senior spokesperson for Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman, told L.A. TACO that all habeas cases “undergo a meticulous review” by prosecutors in their Habeas Corpus Unit (HCU). According to Dunn, more than 400 pages of “materials” related to Luis’ case were submitted to the unit, “and as with all case reviews, a thorough evaluation takes time.”
“Because habeas proceedings are still pending, we have no additional information to share at this time,” Dunn concluded.
In prison, Luis has earned a reputation for being able to fix anything.
“I’m pretty much like a handyman . . . anything you give me, I can fix,” he says.
During a “big search” in May, a screwdriver was found in Luis’ cell, and he was sent to “the hole” before being transferred to another prison.
In early June, he began the multiday bus ride from Pleasant Valley State Prison in Fresno County to Calipatria State Prison, a notorious prison that lies nearly 200 feet below sea level, about an hour's drive from the Mexico border, in a “hot and humid” part of Southern California that exceeds 110 degrees during the hottest months of the year.
As he waits for Judge Kerlin’s ruling, Luis is feeling anxious and perhaps a bit paranoid. After he was transferred to Calipatria, our own communications with him slowed down.
“I feel like I’m being retaliated against,” he tells L.A. TACO.
“My hopes are high, but at the same time I know the system too well,” Luis says.
On the morning of July 29, Luis’ brother Jorge drove around Downtown looking for parking. While his sister, Maya Salinas, ran up to room 114 of the Clara Shortridge Foltz courthouse. Inside the courtroom, Deputy District Attorney Jessica Balady and Luis’ attorney, Claudia Salinas, met with Judge Karla Kerlin, the presiding judge in Luis’ case.
For weeks, Luis had been nervously anticipating this day. It was the day that he would find out if his case would move forward or if Judge Kerlin might deny his petition. But unfortunately, he wasn’t able to attend the hearing. From a cell nearly 200 miles away from Downtown Los Angeles, all Luis could do was wait for a call from his brother to find out how things went.
“Alright, I have reviewed the briefs that were filed in this case,” the veteran state judge told the attorneys. “And I believe there are sufficient disputed factual issues and credibility issues such that an evidentiary hearing is required.”
Kerlin identified seven issues in the case: whether there were two shooters or one, William’s identification of Luis on the night of the shooting, whether or not Luis was a member of a gang at the time of the shooting, Hector’s alleged confession to Walter (the Montebello tattoo shop owner), and the credibility of Betty, Ignacio, and other alibi witnesses.
She set aside two days for the evidentiary hearing: October 23 and October 30.
Kerlin also ruled there should be a separate evidentiary hearing to explore claims that Luis made under the Racial Justice Act.
“It went as best as it possibly could,” Luis’ attorney, Claudia Salinas, told L.A. TACO later that afternoon.
Towards the end of the hearing, Judge Kerlin invited the two attorneys to come to some sort of “a resolution” before the evidentiary hearing. It was the third time that Kerlin had made the suggestion, according to Claudia.
“[The prosecution] indicated that they weren’t interested,” she added.
By the time Jorge found parking, the hearing was over.
Eventually, the “good news” reached Luis at Calipatria State Prison.
“It's a good sign,” Luis tells L.A. TACO. “It’s a good step forward, and I'm one step closer to getting out of here.”
LITTLE TIJUANA
On a scorching hot Sunday morning in early March, Luis’ supporters gathered in L.A.’s Elysian Park to raise awareness for his case and other wrongfully convicted people.
While people unloaded snacks, drinks, and supplies for a long day in the sun, classic cars, lowered to the point that their metal bodies scraped the red-hot pavement, slowly crept down Stadium Way, the picturesque palm-tree-lined road leading to Dodger Stadium.
After a slight delay due to a road closure, the event for Luis began with a prayer from Luis’ mother, followed by speeches from formerly incarcerated people and supporters.
“Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle them in the fire of your love,” Luis’ mother said. “Send forth your spirit and all shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.”
“We're going to be here through the end,” Claudia Salinas, Luis’ attorney, told the crowd. “And I do really hope and manifest that Luis is going to be here with us celebrating the next time that we're here together.”
Afterwards, people lined up for beef and chicken tacos that Luis’ father, Salvador Salinas, made himself, while music played over a PA system.
“I hope they like the tacos,” Salvador said with a laugh during an interview with L.A. TACO.
As a father, watching his son spend his youth behind bars, for a crime he says he didn’t commit, has been challenging.
“Sometimes, they let us visit, sometimes they don’t. But what can we do?” Salvador told L.A. TACO.
“There’s so many things that just point to, you know, [Luis] being factually innocent,” Perla Esquival, a local organizer who has been fighting to free Luis from prison, tells L.A. TACO during an interview at the event.
Perla and Luis have known each other since they were teenagers.
“We were introduced through his sister,” says Perla. “She was my best friend.”
When Luis was first convicted, Perla was too young to understand the “complexities of mass incarceration and wrongful convictions,” she says. It wasn’t until she got older that she leaped into community organizing and criminal justice reform.
“Yeah, I would say I owe it to him,” says Perla. “[Luis’ case] screams innocence. But for whatever reason, you know, they don’t want to let him go.”
When asked what she would tell District Attorney Nathan Hochman if she had a chance to speak with him, Luis' mother, Irene Morales, pleads for Hochman to have compassion and mercy, not just for people who are incarcerated, but also the mothers and families impacted by the D.A.’s decisions as well.
“Because I imagine [Hochman] also has a family, he has children,” she says. “Please take into account what [you] do and do [your] job well.”
Today, the lookouts who used to keep an eye on Witmer Street from the roofs and balconies of apartment buildings are gone. Luxury apartments are popping up and relics from Luis’ childhood, like Pacific Dining Car, have been torn down. Luis hasn’t stepped foot in Westlake in 20 years, but he knows that it has changed dramatically.
Luis hung out on Witmer Street, but he grew up on Westmoreland Avenue, another street named after an early Los Angeles pioneer that zigzags north-to-south along the far west side of “the neighborhood.”
The stretch of Westmoreland that Luis grew up in ends in a dead end, which made rivals think twice about going down his street because there “was a good chance they weren’t going to make it back,” he says.
“There's a lot of history in that small area,” Luis says. “Surviving that place is a big deal, especially if you lived thru (sic) the ‘80s and ‘90s. I caught the end of it in the late ‘90s. It was still bad, but it was much, much worse in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.”
Despite the circumstances, Luis also has fond memories of growing up on Westmoreland Avenue. He remembers the fruit and ice cream trucks that were always parked on the street. And a lady who sold tacos. The trees that people used to post up in, the girl that he used to date, and the friend who still lives on the block.
“We used to call it ‘lil [Tijuana],’” he says with a laugh. “The streets were always packed at all hours.”
There were parties every weekend, and Luis knew everyone on Westmoreland. Today, it’s mostly a quiet street, he says.
“It was just a great experience even with all the crazy stuff going on trying to survive,” he says.
“It was great times.”
Lizbeth Solorzano contributed to this report by translating Spanish interviews to English.
