Remember David Raya? Unarmed and killed on Güinida Lane eleven years ago, shot in the back by Anaheim Police Officer Bruce Linn as he ran for his life? Sounds like an Anaheim story you’ve heard a hundred times, huh?
Except you don’t hear that much about David these days. He was the FIRST OF EIGHT young men shot by Anaheim police between August 2011 and July 2012. That’s eight, counting Gerardo Piñeda who didn’t die – so SEVEN were killed by APD guns in those 12 months, which seem in retrospect to have been the height of Deputy Chief Craig Hunter‘s war against suspected gang members.
- Six of those young men (including David) were Latinos in their early 20’s.
- MOST of them (including David) were unarmed, and ALL SIX were trying to flee.
- In every case, even though the young men were just trying to get away, the officer claimed “I feared for my life.”
- And in every case our DA (the as-bad-as-Spitzer Tony Rackauckas) found the killing “justified.”
But back to David Raya. David was very close to and protective of his sister Claudia, who was one year younger than him. Their cousin Linda says “he was tough because of where we grew up but he was a real sweetheart to those who knew him.” David’s and Claudia’s father died when they were four, and their mother, Maria Lopez, got together with a new guy, a younger guy, Chris Valeriano. Soon there were seven kids in this blended family, Maria and Chris married, and they moved from Anaheim to Fullerton. But David, who was a fantastic baseball pitcher and had a hilarious sense of humor, preferred hanging out with his friends from junior high, who lived in the Güinida neighborhood, home of the gang AVLS (Anaheim Vatos Locos.)
Not good. Details are scant (as they are in general on this and other decade-old cases) but at the age of 16 he was arrested, and later plead guilty to “felony assault with a firearm.” And, according to the Weekly, he was then sentenced to four years in state prison, although Claudia says he was in jail and prison for this charge for SEVEN years, from age 16 to 23.
Prison was miserable for David. He worked as a cook, and got pretty good at that, and spent most of his time drawing. But mostly he said he was just lonely, and when he finally got out at age 23 he swore he’d never go back. Here is (apparently) the only remaining sample of his artwork, which Claudia photographed and saved:
When David got out in 2011 he tried staying with his family in Fullerton, and working with his mom cooking in a convalescent home, but Claudia says he just felt like he was a burden on them. He started spending more time with his old friends on Güinida, and soon was living over there with his girlfriend Nica.
A good friend of David’s at that time was 21-year-old Joel Acevedo, who would later be killed 11 months after David. There was a time, a couple months before David’s killing, that the two were pulled over riding in a truck borrowed by Joey’s girlfriend from her family (and not returned promptly.) David took off running but Joey stayed in the car and went to jail; hence Joey was in jail when David was killed. David got away, and the police hate it when someone gets away.
David had stopped going to his parole appointments, because he knew he wasn’t going to test clean, and more than anything didn’t want to go back to prison again. So the Anaheim police had an excuse to go looking for him…
But, wait a second…
QUICK IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Who knew that Spitzer’s DA office had started clearing all their older “Incident Reports” off their website, so now the oldest ones there are from 2016? This is the promised transparency? Do they think we don’t care about any murders more than six years old? I never heard any announcement about this, did you?
I called the office assuming there were some “archives” somewhere, but they instructed me to file a PRA with the relevant police department. Yeah that works out real well. Thank God the ACLU had the foresight to copy and save all the DA’s incident reports, what would we do without them?
The August 16, 2011 Killing on Güinida
According to the APD, when David stopped going to his parole appointments he rose to the top of their MOST WANTED list. According to the APD, they had informants who told them David “was involved in stealing at least two cars” (Claudia has never even seen her brother driving a car), and “had access to at least three guns” (what the hell does that mean, “having access” to a gun? As things turned out, he had no gun on him and none in the place he was staying.) So now David was not only MOST WANTED but also PRESUMED ARMED AND DANGEROUS.
Well, David’s girlfriend Nica was on probation, the police knew he was staying at her apartment, and once they were pretty sure he was in there, they surrounded his place – right around noon – NINE cops in the front and two cops – Bruce Linn and Chad Meyer – hiding out quietly out back. Then a cop out front banged on the door and yelled out, “APD – PROBATION SEARCH – ANYONE INSIDE COME OUT!” Immediately David jumped out the back window, coming eye to eye with Linn and Meyer.
Oh – have we met Bruce Linn yet?
That’s Officer Bruce Linn in the middle, getting some award while retiring in 2015. Two years before killing unarmed David Raya he was part of the five-officer firing squad that blew away unarmed Caesar Cruz. It turns out he’d shot three other people, not fatally, beginning in 2002. Ironically, less than a year after killing David Raya, he was put in charge of investigating Officer Dan Hurtado‘s killing of Martin Hernandez – was that by any chance supposed to be funny? A further irony – (now) Congressman Lou Correa, an unquestioning law-and-order politician who never questions police brutality, is smiling over Bruce’s shoulder… except Lou once in an unguarded moment admitted that he TOO “used to run away from the cops when I was young.” Well, Lou sure is lucky that Officer Bruce Linn wasn’t around back then!
Back on the Clock…
We are going by Officer Linn’s account to the DA here, and all of this must have happened in a matter of seconds, as we have examined the scene with Claudia… but anyway Linn shouted, “Put your hands up!” as David ran away towards the wall. And as David ran away towards the wall, followed by Linn and Meyer, they say he tugged at the back of his shorts, in a way that made them “fear for their lives!”
In hindsight, the cops admit David was just trying to dispose of a glass pipe he had hidden back there – he really didn’t want to go back to prison! – but Bruce shares a little slice of Bruce life hoping to explain his terror: he told investigators that “he personally wears gym shorts and can carry his wallet, badge and gun in them completely concealed… [and] the way Raya cleared his shirt from his waistband reminded him of how HE was trained at the range to clear his shirt to retrieve his concealed weapon.”
So there you have it. “Fearing for his life,” Linn fired thrice at the fleeing young man, apparently missing him (How? At the range of 7-10 feet?), watched him leap over the concrete wall above, and fired two more times hitting him in the back as he leapt over a now-removed short iron fence and collapsed.
Linn claims there were no witnesses to this early-afternoon killing other than his partner Meyer; that may or may not be, but plenty of people witnessed how long it took them to get David into an ambulance, and how long the cops chatted with the ambulance driver before they took off for the hospital. Soon poor David was dead. RIP, Chops.
Maria’s Settlement
Claudia, no longer close to her family, remembers overhearing her mother saying to her attorney, the fabled Richard Hermann, “I want money for what the Anaheim Police did to my son.” And she got it. As Hermann wrote in his complaint:
“On August 16, 2011, David Raya was running away from his girlfriend’s home where he had seen police officers trying to serve a warrant because he had not reported to his parole agents. … He was shot and killed by shots in the back. These shots were fired by a City of Anaheim Police Officer who is a member of the City of Anaheim Police Crime Task Force which operates as a Death Squad basically shooting and killing persons who are felons or ex-felons and supposedly Hispanic gang members.
“This is similar to the police execution death by the Crime Task Force by five police officers including Officer Bruce Linn who shot and killed Caesar Cruz in 2009 ALSO because Mr. Cruz was allegedly ‘reaching into his waistband’ but of course there was no gun in Mr. Cruz’ waistband either.
“The City of Anaheim Police Death Squad basically gets its ‘information’ that Mexican gang members ‘do not want to go back to prison’ which is code for permission to shoot and kill them. Neither Mr. Raya nor Mr. Cruz presented any resistance to the City of Anaheim Police Death Squad, nor in Mr. Raya’s case did he do anything but run away, and was shot three times in the back causing him to bleed to death.
And the City of Anaheim voted to give Maria $245,000 – a healthy settlement, and a tacit admission that the death WAS wrongful and unnecessary and would be very hard to defend in court. And yet… the shooting and killing didn’t let up, did they.
AFTERMATHS.
The life of David Raya was short and sad, and its premature end didn’t seem to stop, but instead spread out, like streams of blood:
- THE MEMORIAL DRIVE-BY. As is traditional, a memorial was held for David six days later on Güinida Lane. Unusually for a place that was usually crawling with Anaheim cops, that evening they were nowhere to be seen, which was nice at first. Then, just as the crowd was starting to go home, members of a rival gang drove by and fired at them. They hit three guys and one died – remember David’s young stepfather, Chris Valeriano? They got him. Not even a gang member. And he was only 37. Then, as Matt Coker wrote in the Weekly, “The vehicle disappeared into the night.”
- THE KILLING OF JOEY. We saw earlier how Joey went to jail while David got away, and Joey was in jail when they killed David. But Joey got out a few months later, and eleven months after killing David they killed Joey a couple hundred yards down the street, and this time they were able to plant a gun on him. It really seemed like the APD gang unit, under Craig Hunter, had a list of people they intended to get, for some reason.
- THE UNMARKED BST CAR. This is a strange episode that happened in the neighborhood in early June 2012 (two months before they killed Joey) – three gang unit officers slowly drove a car they’d taken from rival gang BST (Barrio Small Town) through the neighborhood after midnight – apparently after firing a gun to get attention (they say that wasn’t them.) When, predictably, three young AVLS members ran out to defend their neighborhood, one of them firing at the unmarked car, the cops drove off in a hurry! Other gang unit cops were all ready to catch the three guys, and they were charged with trying to kill officers – that didn’t stick, thankfully, these officers were obviously pretending to be a rival gang attempting a drive-by. That was a stupid trick. But the three guys still got prison time.
- THE KILLING OF EDDER. Bruce Linn claimed there were no witnesses to his killing of David besides his partner Meyer, but David’s girlfriend Nica had a little 13-year old brother named John Edgar Perez, nicknamed Edder, who said he watched the whole thing from across the street. He commented on an OC Weekly story with a much different story than the police told, emphasizing what a long time they took letting David bleed to death. A little later, at the age of 14, he was shot and killed on the street by BST members… and his comment on the Weekly disappeared.
It’s a lot of suspicious stuff to figure out, and calls for a better investigative journalist than me, but I just didn’t want to let August 16 go by without reminding you of the life and death of David Raya. And here is a little collage Claudia sent me, which looks like it includes some MORE of David’s artwork, featuring the Angel Stadium, and who doesn’t like that?
Happy Day…… Vern, Sir… Please… Thank you… Your article gives me survivors guilt after living through this era, and having the police try to kill me a few times also… It also makes the fight against Honorable Todd Spitzer all the more important with the destruction of files….. and the Weekly…. dropping a good story…. trying to change the past…. OC Weekly, now, sadly looks like a county supported spokesperson…. and not a viable news outlet….!!!
We Need to Make a ‘online’ library, all in one information,on each of these young men,”gone to soon”!.
Vern, much of what you have done on Orange Juice, including family pictures, Place of Burial (if applicable)..a “living Memorial” to all of them, that have been taking much to soon….
Sad. DA Spitzer has to go. Vern, you have the officiall recall email, message me if you want to join us again in March. Just be sane and leave out the whole “for prison” thing. The slogan was unprofessional and made the recall look like a joke. With so many highly qualified lawyers in the OC, we can do better. The official email handle is checked by me now. We hope Mr Jacobs will be interested in running again. He has spoken out about police corruption when he ran. He addressed the current situation at OCDA. Well now we got ourselves Shaun Nelson for a judge soon, so someone needs to be watching these criminal cases in real time. PS, Chris Gonzales is another good option.