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Chronicle: Gladys Arellano, after two decades her murderer is caught

2020-11-22T16:44:09+00:00
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Foto: Departamento del Alguacil del Condado de Los Ángeles.
  • Gladys Arellano, 17, was murdered more than 20 years ago and her crime finally has a presumed culprit.
  • José Luis García, 43, is in custody accused of having kidnapped, raped and strangled Arellano.
  • The man was arrested for another crime and his DNA samples link him to the murder of the girl in 1996.

Gladys Arellano was raped and murdered in California in 1996. After years of mystery, there is finally a detainee accused of this crime.

The case of Arellano, 17 years old

at the time of death, was like a unsolved crime for 24 years until science revealed an alleged perpetrator, who was arrested in Dallas, Texas.

José Luis García, 43, was arrested in connection with another crime but his deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) samples, which are taken from all prisoners, link him to the rape and murder of Arellano.

The chronicle is narrated below based on the legal documents of the case of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) and the Dallas Police Department (DPD).

Gladys Arellano was a smiling and friendly girl, the daughter of immigrants, and born and raised in the Hispanic neighborhood of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles.

On Sunday, January 28, 1996 Arellano, according to his family, had a normal day with his school activities and taking a temporary job. Relatives remember seeing the girl leave her house to see a friend.

The memories of many witnesses are very fresh, until now, because that night was the Super Bowl game of the American football championship between the Dallas Cowboys vs. Pittsburgh Steelers and his family were gathered at the house.

They never saw Gladys Arellano again because the girl never reached her destination. The following Monday, the family filed a missing report with LACSD as no one in Boyle Heights knew about the girl.

Gladys Arellano, 17, left her home on February 28, 1996 and her family never saw her alive again. (Photos: Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)

For two days the investigation was kept as a case of a disappearance, perhaps an escape, of a teenage girl.

The case turned upside down on January 30, 1996 when a walker notified the authorities that he had seen the body of a woman lying at the bottom of a ravine.

LACSD officers reported to Topanga Canyon, a mountainous rural area, just off the road in Malibu, California, where the body had been seen.

At the scene, LACSD officials determined that the dead girl they found was the young Gladys Arellano, reported as missing by her family. Topanga Canyon is about 25 miles from Boyle Heights.

José Luis García, 43, was linked to Gladys Arellano’s death more than 20 years later thanks to DNA samples taken from him when he was detained for another crime.

The officers of the LACSD Homicide Division stated in their investigation that the girl’s body was partially naked, had been raped with extreme violence and had also been strangled.

For years the case in the rape and death of Gladys Arellano was a mystery to the authorities.

LACSD Homicide Division agents interviewed hundreds of witnesses and questioned dozens of suspects but could not find a single clue that could help them solve the mysterious and brutal crime.

The passage of time moved the case from the Homicide Division to the Unsolved Crimes Division, made up of agents specialized in solving difficult crimes.

However, more than two decades passed and not even the agents of the LACSD Division of Unsolved Crimes were able to advance anything in the investigation. Over the years it seemed that the crime of Gladys Arellano would be forgotten.

Within the forensic evidence in the death of Gladys Arellano, the scientific investigation detectives managed to isolate DNA samples that did not belong to the girl and that were in her body.

Those samples were kept in a Los Angeles laboratory all these years, archived only as belonging to an «unknown suspect» and with a number linked to the rape and murder of Arellano.

Fate changed for authorities on November 10, 2019 when a domestic violence case, which seemed routine, determined who could be the culprit of Gladys Arellano’s murder.

In that month, agents of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD, for its acronym in English) arrested José Luis García in the San Fernando Valley for a case of violent assault on his wife. Upon arrival at the jail, his DNA was routinely sampled as is done with all prisoners with the saliva contained inside their mouths.

For that crime, Garcia was only detained for two days in the Los Angeles County Jail and then released on bail by a judge. His DNA samples, as a common procedure, were sent to a national base to be compared with crime samples throughout the United States.

Then the unexpected happened. Garcia’s samples matched those of the «unknown suspect» in the rape and murder of Gladys Arellano.

However, when LACSD agents went to arrest José Luis García, the man had already escaped and, according to a confidential informant, had moved to Dallas, Texas.

In September, a DPD patrolman stopped Garcia for a traffic shortage and discovered that he was the man they were looking for in Los Angeles as the alleged culprit in the murder of Gladys Arellano 24 years ago. García has already been transferred to California where he will face his criminal process that could finally relieve the Arellano family.

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The post Chronicle: Gladys Arellano, after two decades her murderer is caught appeared first on Hispanic World.

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