The Samantha Salas Connection

The aftermath of a Southern California gang war and its possible connection to the 2008 slaying of a Bay Area nightclub owner

It was a windy Southern California morning. Warm-ish. Maybe the Santa Anas howled through the canyons and passes just above the town of Monrovia, California the night before.

Hard to recall. January 2008 was a lifetime ago.

Brandon Lee (courtesy photo)

I do remember this.

On this particular morning Walt Mancini and I walked along a residential street dotted with two-story apartment buildings, small California-style ranch homes, flat-roofed adobes and front lawns that spanned the spectrum from gray to deep green. Cars were parked along the curb, some dusty and unmoved, some merely dented or scratched and well-used. Many others obviously there because a smooth-talking salesman convinced some average Joe that taking on the responsibility of a $300-a-month car payment for a slick Nissan with dark tint, chrome rims and a CD player wouldn’t affect his bottom line one bit.

Within weeks we would all be average Joes doing our best to survive the Great Recession. But on this morning that future — any future — was far from top of mind.

For what it’s worth, Monrovia, situated 20 miles or so east-north-east of Los Angeles, is middle class city settled by African Americans and Latinos in the 1880s. Unlike the segregated communities of Pasadena and Glendale, Monrovia had few, if any, restrictions on home ownership and took pride in its schools, its orange groves, churches and parks.

By the 1920s, it had become one of the many small towns on the highway between Chicago and Santa Monica that straddled Route 66. Back then, Monrovia welcomed visitors and in the early winter housed snowbirds looking to get away from the frozen tundra of Detroit, Buffalo, the Jim Crow south, the dustbowl or wherever. Some of weird and wild architecture of the Mother Road, like the Aztec Hotel, is still visible to the tourist with a keen eye and a taste for adventure.

Monrovia’s neighbor Duarte, home to City of Hope, went through similar ups and downs. Situated along the upper San Gabriel River and at the bottom of Fish Canyon, some of the nations finest granite is mined nearly within spitting distance of city hall. Duarte was always smaller than Monrovia and always a bit scrappier.

In the 1970s and 80s, Monrovia and Duarte fell upon hard times. The newly completed 210 and 605 freeways bypassed Route 66. Myrtle Avenue, Monrovia’s once bustling main drag, was home to several pawn shops. Many acted as fence operations for moving stolen goods and money laundering operations. Duarte faired worse.

In the vacuum of the breakdown, gangs formed. Duarte was home to the DuRoc Crips, a mostly black gang. Duarte Eastside and Monrovia Nuevo Varrio sprouted in the Latino communities. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the community clawed its way back. In 1994, Monrovia was named an All-America city by the National Civic League. Times were good.

Then times got tough. In fall of 2007 the local gangs went to war.

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I’d done other things in a newsroom, but I liked being a cops reporter. You could sit at your desk in the evening after the editors and city reporters had gone home and listen to the police scanner waiting for that big story to break.

Shots fired calls, liquor store holdups, small fires, domestic disputes happened all the time. Patience meant you held out for the big story. You can guess what those might have been. The routine on those big news nights would require hopping in a car with a photog, zooming out to some darkened neighborhood, trying to interview people and smoking a ton of cigarettes before rushing back or calling in to file a story on deadline.

The newsroom on deadline.

Breaking news reporting is rush that’s indescribable and can be dangerous. I’ve come across homicides before the cops got there; walked up to a scene as a woman who had just murdered her family was being taken into custody; been shot at (once); and been in a whole bunch of other situations I’ve pushed out of my head.

On a ride along in the 1990s in Monrovia, the patrol car I was in was first on the scene of a double homicide. As we drove up, a woman stood screaming on the front lawn of a bungalow just off Foothill. We walked into the house and found a man, a woman and a dog had been shot to death. Blood that pooled on the hardwood floor looked like someone spilled out a lava lamp.

Drug paraphernalia was strewn about. A baby was unharmed in its crib. It’s haunting.

So, as we walked, I felt like I knew this neighborhood.

In those months before the financial meltdown, I covered or edited stories about several fatal and non fatal shootings in Monrovia and Duarte and a neighboring area of unincorporated communities.

A pattern didn’t really present itself until January 26, 2008. That’s the night Samantha Salas was shot while visiting her estranged dad at an apartment complex on the south side of unincorporated Monrovia. They hadn’t seen each other for months.

Her death followed the slaying of 63-year-old Sanders Rollins, a longtime fixture of the community who was shot and killed as he stood on his porch.

His porch.

Rollins, Salas. There were others. The whole thing was sickening.

The night she died, Salas left her dad’s apartment with some friends to walk across the street to a small neighborhood dairy for gum. Almost as soon the group stepped out onto the street, automatic rifle fire rang out, spraying the teens and the building. Salas was instantly killed. Police seemed to have no leads and the community begged for extra patrols, some sort of gang injunction, and a crackdown on crime.

The downmarket apartment building, wedged between a trailer park and a storefront church, was pock marked with bullet holes for days. Eventually, they were plastered over and painted a shade too white. The reminders of the ambush murder looked just like discolored scars you might see on a veterano or a soldier years after the wound had healed.

Salas was hardly gone when another shooting rocked Monrovia. This time the victim was Brandon Lee. A 19-year-old, Lee was shot to death at 8 p.m. on a warmish Tuesday night standing outside his mother’s home, near where Sanders had been killed and just a few miles from where Salas was slain.

Rollins, Salas, Lee.

That’s what brought Walt and I to this residential neighborhood in the Foothills on a weirdly sunny warmish winter morning. Naivety ruled our thoughts and actions. If the cops couldn’t do anything, maybe a front-page story or two would spur community action. Unlikely now. I know.

I parked several blocks away and as we walked, we could see something pretty wild developing. News crews from around Los Angeles descended on Monrovia. That’s a lot of news. Back then you had the networks, FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, a local cable channel or two, three Spanish language news networks, three radio stations known for on the spot news coverage and an assortment of newspaper reporters from various English, Spanish, Chinese and Tagalog language outlets.

Satellite trucks, microphones and cameras were everywhere. The dam broke.

Samantha Salas’ mother is comforted at a memorial.

The deaths of Rollins, Salas and Lee were emblematic of what had been going on for months, but unreported in a big way for a variety of reasons. Now however, the full attention of the media was focused on these tiny foothill communities and a seemingly intractable gang problem.

We walked to the spot where Lee had been slain. Midblock. Southside of the street. Bare lawn. No trees. A makeshift memorial.

A crowd of locals had gathered just beyond the cameras. Among them was Samantha’s mother. I recognized her as we had spoken several times since her daughter’s tragic death. Lee’s memorial was a poster-sized photograph and she came there to place flowers in his memory.

In front of us was Lee’s mom. The two women embraced. Tears flowed. They spoke to one another.

Lee’s murder remains unsolved.

That day the community decided to fix its gang problem.

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Police responded in force. The gang war slowed, but trouble continued in Monrovia and Duarte. The community decided it would be best to get an civil court restraining order against the criminals. Even so, a gang injunction wouldn’t happen until December 2009.

It took effect days after the murder of Jason Gentile, 22.

News accounts from the time of Gentile’s killing say a woman identified as “Shonetish Owens” came upon the scene shortly after the slaying. Reporters captured her recalling what she saw.

"I see some guy just laying on the ground, and all this blood and stuff coming out of his mouth, and his girlfriend was crying on the ground," said local resident Shonetish Owens.

What’s interesting about Owens is that the same name turns up again in court records related to the March 2008 slaying of Mark Achilli in Los Gatos, California.

You can read some previous reporting on the case here, here, here, here and here.

As for the records?