LAPD Goes Tit For Tat With Gangs

They say life imitates art but in the following story art truly imitated life. You see, poor Anthony Garcia recently found himself thrown into the slammer on account of his chest tattoo -that being his chest tattoo that, point by point, depicts an unsolved homicide.



From the L.A. Times:

The process was routine. L.A. County Sheriff's homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd was flipping through snapshots of tattooed gang members.

Then one caught his attention.

Inked on the pudgy chest of a young Pico Rivera gangster who had been picked up and released on a minor offense was the scene of a 2004 liquor store slaying that had stumped Lloyd for more than four years.

Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.

As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias "Chopper" was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.

Lloyd's discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia's arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff's detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving.

I hate to go back to another old adage but they say a picture is worth 1,000 words and a picture that can’t be destroyed is worth a life sentence.

What you don’t know is this is the same way we got Osama bin Laden. His courier had a tattoo of a map to his Pakistani compound.