Two men who were wrongfully convicted for a fatal drive-by shooting in Hawthorne in 1997 and spent more than 23 years in prison are suing four former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and an LAPD police officer, claiming they framed the pair for murder.
Both John Klene, 44, and Eduardo Dumbrique, 41, were exonerated last year by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office after nearly a decade of investigation by a nonprofit group who worked on a pro bono basis.
Klene was convicted of first-degree murder for the June 28, 1997, slaying of 25-year-old Antonio Alarcon. He was sentenced in 1999 to life in prison without parole, but was released from Pleasant Valley State Prison on Feb. 19, 2021, after his exoneration, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabiliation.
Dumbrique was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. He was released from Centinela State Prison on March 19, 2021, Thornton said.
In March, Klene and Dumbrique were each awarded more than $1.2 million in compensation from the state — $140 for every day they wrongfully spent in prison, said their attorney, Deirdre O’Connor, in a telephone interview Monday, Nov. 14.
Federal trial sought
In their lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the pair now are seeking further compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial. They allege that, despite evidence pointing to another suspect in the killing, Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators Doral Riggs, Reynold Verdugo, Frank Merriman and Michael O’Hara, and Los Angeles police Officer Marcella Winn, all conspired, in some way, to pin the blame on Klene and Dubrique, who were 18 and 15 years old at the time, respectively.
All five defendants have retired from their respective agencies, O’Connor said.
Officials at the Los Angeles Police Pepartment declined to comment Tuesday, citing the litigation. Neither the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department nor the District Attorney’s Office responded to requests for comment.
Actual killer identified
The District Attorney’s Office exonerated Klene and Dumbrique after a “thorough investigation” concluded that the evidence on which the prosecution was based was unreliable, and that another man with a long history of violence and murder was the actual perpetrator, according to the lawsuit.
Chad “Ghost” Landrum, the lawsuit states, had been targeting Alarcon for weeks before shooting him about 11 p.m. outside a tire shop in the 11000 block of Prairie Avenue in Hawthorne. Landrum ultimately gave a detailed confession of the crime, confirming that Klene and Dumbrique had nothing to do with it.
Klene and Dumbrique, according to the lawsuit, were in another city the night of the murder, at the home of Klene’s parents watching the legendary fight between Mike Tyson and Evander Hollyfield, with a number of witnesses present.
Sheriff’s investigators, however, took the word of Landrum’s affiliate, Santo “Payaso” Alvarez, who told them Klene and Dumbrique were involved in the shooting. The investigators then fabricated witness statements about Klene and Dumbrique being seen in a green vehicle used in the fatal attack.
Witness coached
Additionally, the sheriff’s investigators, the lawsuit states, falsely claimed that a man who worked at the tire shop near where the shooting occurred recanted his identifications of Klene and Dumbrique from an in-person lineup due to fear of gang retaliation. In fact, the witness signed a sworn statement saying he could not identify the shooter or passengers in the vehicle. and that the sheriff’s investigators coached him in identifying the two teenagers as the culprits.
While the sheriff’s investigators zeroed in on Klene and Dumbrique, it left Landrum to remain free to “grusomely murder a homeless man, Richard Daly, about three weeks following Alarcon’s murder,” the lawsuit states. Moreover, the suit states, he was assisted by Alvarez, the Sheriff’s Department’s key witness in the Alarcon murder case.
Link to San Pedro murder
Daly’s body was found burning in an alley in San Pedro on July 21, 1997. Winn, the LAPD officer assigned to the case, began receiving tips from confidential informants that Daly was killed by members of the Lawndale 13 street gang, and that three members of the gang — Lester Monllor, Landrum and Alvarez — beat Daly to death with a claw hammer in a house on Firmona Avenue in Lawndale.
Monllor, Landrum and Susan Mellen were subsequently arrested and charged with Daly’s murder. Mellen had previously lived with her mother in a house on the Lawndale property that was vacant at the time of Daly’s killing and where the killing occurred. A witness later proven unreliable implicated Mellen in the fatal beating of Daly.
Alvarez, however, was not arrested and charged with Daly’s murder, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Mellen, according to the national registry, told Winn she was not involved in the murder and that on the day of the crime she was moving from Redondo Beach to Gardena.
O’Connor’s investigation determined that the woman who implicated Mellen, June Patti — the prosecution’s sole witness against Mellen — was unreliable, and had attempted on numerous occasions to inform several different Los Angeles police agencies about wrongdoing by others, but had been discredited in every instance. Furthermore, prosecutors did not disclose to Mellen’s defense lawyer at the time any of the information about Patti’s past contact with police officers, according to the national registry.
$12 million settlement
A jury convicted Mellen of first-degree murder on May 15, 1998. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole. But in November 2014, a judge, amid the evidence presented, declared Mellen factually innocent, and she was subsequently released from custody.
The state awarded Mellen $597,200 in compensation for her wrongful incarceration and the city of Los Angeles settled her federal civil rights lawsuit for $12 million.
When Winn learned of Landrum and Alvarez’s role in Alarcon’s killing, she conspired with the sheriff’s investigators to help finger Klene and Dumbrique for the crime by “manipulating evidence” and “erasing” Alvarez from the narrative to protect both prosecutions, according to the lawsuit filed on behalf of Klene and Dumbrique.
“As a result, not only were Klene and Dumbrique wrongly convicted of the Alarcon murder, but another innocent person, Susan Mellen, spent 17 years wrongly imprisoned for the Daly murder before she was exonerated,” according to the lawsuit. “Astonishingly, Winn caused at least three other proven wrongful convictions.”
Winn could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
In a telephone interview, O’Connor said she first started digging into the Klene and Dumbrique case in 2012 after someone close to Klene reached out to her and her nonprofit, Innocence Matters, for help.
“Though we were able to relatively quickly develop overwhelming evidence of innocence, it took awhile to work its way through the process,” O’Connor said.
Now, O’Connor said, Innocence Matters is somewhat in defunct status as she transitions the pro bono work to a wing of her Torrance-based law firm, Seamus Law.