At a Juvenile Court hearing this week in East Lost Angeles, sheriff’s deputies led shackled defendants into a courtroom reserved for youths accused of serious crimes.
Most were baby-faced teenagers wearing orange jumpsuits. Then they brought out a 39-year-old father of four.
The man, Victor Perez, is accused of killing a woman in Hollywood in 2003. But because he was 17 at the time, Perez, who has pleaded not guilty, is being prosecuted as a juvenile — at least for now.
At a hearing on Monday to justify keeping Perez detained, prosecutors revealed some of the evidence that led to his arrest in 2022.
Whereas many cold cases are solved with DNA testing, detectives said it was old-fashioned police work — talking to informants and eventually to Perez himself — that led to an arrest in a case that had gone unsolved for 19 years.
The killing occurred around 10:30 p.m. on Nov. 28, 2003. After eating Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a family friend, Rosalba Acosta, 42, piled into her family’s silver F-150 truck along with her husband, daughter and two sons.
Her husband, Jose, had been drinking, so after backing the truck into the street, he switched seats with Rosalba, who was planning to drive the family back to the San Fernando Valley, their son Louis testified Monday. She was about to pull away from the curb when Louis, who was sitting next to his mother, heard shots.
Louis testified he turned to see a car behind them. Someone was leaning out the front passenger window, pointing a handgun. Louis saw muzzle flashes and the truck’s rear windshield exploded. He yelled at his mother to drive.
She lay slumped over, motionless. Louis took the wheel and stepped on the gas.
Sean Murtha, a Los Angeles Police Department officer, testified he responded to a 911 call and found people milling around an F-150 in the middle of Fountain Avenue, “crying, yelling hysterically.”
A single bullet had flown through the back of Rosalba’s headrest.
Rosalba and her husband grew up on the same street in Culiacán, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, Louis said in an interview. The two started dating as teenagers, and when Jose turned 18 he came to Los Angeles.
He worked back-to-back shifts at a 76 gas station in Northridge and a Texaco across the street, Louis said. Rosalba remained in Culiacán, helping raise her six younger siblings, until she joined Jose around 1979. She learned English by watching “I Love Lucy,” Louis said.
Rosalba and Jose married and raised their children in the San Fernando Valley. Her daughter, Liza Pauley, recalled Rosalba as a skilled cook whose birria and pozole were the envy of her childhood friends.
“That was her joy, to feed us,” Pauley said. “We looked forward to coming home because we knew we’d get a home-cooked meal.”
Rosalba worked in the accounting department of a mail order catalog company and later helped her husband run a mechanic shop in Granada Hills. Three years before she died, she gave birth to a boy, Andrew.
“She poured everything that she was and had into him,” Pauley said.
Andrew was in a car seat in the F-150 the night Rosalba was killed.
“My biggest heartbreak about losing her is that my brother didn’t get to experience her love,” Pauley said.
Then a senior at UC Riverside, Pauley moved home after her mother’s death. She split time between class, commuting and raising her brother. She told her father she wanted to quit school to help out full time. Her father wouldn’t hear it.
Pauley finished her senior year, sometimes cutting out of class early to help out at home and catching up with notes from classmates. Louis took their youngest brother to baseball practice, she said, and their father supported the family financially.
“We all had to pull our weight to raise him,” she said.
Louis said he never stopped wondering who killed her. He knew that part of Hollywood was plagued by gangs, and suspected it was a case of wrong place, wrong time.
“We tried to move on the best we could, and as far as someone having to pay for what they did, it was an afterthought,” he said.
In 2009, an informant told the LAPD that Perez had admitted to participating in the shooting. According to the informant, Perez said he was driving with three others in his green Honda Accord when they spotted a pickup truck. Inside, they thought they saw members of a gang called TMC, the informant said Perez told him.
Perez allegedly said he “unloaded a clip” into the back of the truck, LeeAnn Jones, a retired LAPD detective who interviewed the informant, testified. It was only after Perez saw coverage of the shooting on the news that he realized he’d killed a woman, the source told Jones. According to Jones, the informant said Perez was “haunted” by her death and started going to church.
It wasn’t clear from Monday’s testimony why Perez wasn’t arrested until 2022.
Taken into custody on an unrelated charge, Perez was interviewed about Rosalba’s killing at the LAPD’s 77th Street station, Det. Frank Flores testified.
Perez swore on his children that he didn’t kill the woman, Flores said. He admitted being a member of BH, a tagger crew that was being recruited into MS-13, a notorious Salvadoran American gang that claims much of Hollywood as its turf.
The night Rosalba was killed, some guys from MS-13 borrowed his Accord, Perez told Flores. When they returned, he said, one of the MS-13 members handed him a gun and told him to hide it.
Flores and his partner said they didn’t believe him. Perez requested a polygraph test and failed it, Flores testified.
Told he had one last chance to tell the truth, Perez changed his story, Flores said: An older MS-13 member called Smokey said he’d been jumped by a rival gang. Perez and three others — one armed with a gun — went looking for Smokey’s assailants.
Perez pulled up behind a truck, he told detectives. “Is that them?” someone asked. Then the man sitting in the front passenger seat leaned out the window and fired into the pickup, Perez told detectives.
Perez said he was shocked. He’d thought they were going to get into a fistfight, he told detectives. They booked him on one count of murder.
His attorney, Sarah Javaheri, said Perez had no intent to kill anyone. She argued his own admissions weren’t truthful because he was subjected to coercive interview tactics by the LAPD. She also highlighted inconsistencies between Perez’s account and the statements of eyewitnesses who described a different car fleeing the scene.
“I don’t think that’s enough for probable cause for a homicide,” she said in asking Robert J. Totten, the Juvenile Court commissioner, to dismiss the case.
Totten disagreed, ruling Perez should remain in custody in the Los Angeles County jail. The next step in the case is a transfer hearing where prosecutors will present arguments for why Perez should be tried as an adult rather than a juvenile. It’s unclear how much time Perez would serve if he were convicted of murder as a juvenile. A murder conviction for an adult carries a sentence ranging from 15 years in prison to life without parole, depending on the degree.
Louis said he believes Perez should be treated as an adult. “He made an adult decision. He didn’t just kill my mom. He almost wiped out a whole family,” he said, noting there were nine cartridge casings found at the crime scene.
Louis hadn’t seen the man accused of killing his mother until he took the witness stand Monday. He tried to avoid looking at him.
“I wasn’t overly emotional about seeing him,” Louis said. “He’s nobody. I know his name, but I didn’t really want to put a face to his name.”
