September 21, 2009 I got court appointed as investigator/expert witness for a 33 year old murder case that was tried in Dept E of the Pomona (East District) branch of the Los Angeles Superior Court.
The Prosecution Theory
The prosecution’s theory of the case was that on September 9, 1976, my client was in a car driven by their star witness (a felon with multiple convictions that they’d given an immunity deal to), following Roberto Lozano, because Lozano was supposedly having an affair with his wife and was the biological father of his first son. According to this theory, my client shoots Lozano, drives down to San Ysidro (by the U.S. – Mexico border), abandons the car, and flees into Mexico immediately. Then according to the prosecution theory, the defendant hid out first in Mexico and then hid out in Texas by adopting an alias when he re-immigrated to the United States.
Big Problem with the Prosecution Theory
One of my best attributes is to “pick the fly shit out of the pepper” during investigations. Going through lots of documents supplied by the defendant’s family to his lawyer, I found the defendant’s son’s Baptismal Certificate and immediately recognized the significance of it: it was dated September 14, 1976, just five (5) days after the murder of Roberto Lozano.
I tracked down the church, St. Alphonsus in Fresno. I contacted the staff, convinced the on-duty secretary to go down into the basement and locate the Sacramental Registry for 1976. Lo and behold…sure enough….there was the registry listing authenticating the certificate, listing my client and his wife as the parents and one of our witnesses and his wife as the god-parents. I drafted a declaration for the church’s administrator as custodian of records and they rushed a copy down to the lawyer just in time for the trial.
Another Big Problem with the Prosecution Theory
According to the District Attorney’s way of thinking, when the Defendant came back to the United States in the 90’s, he changed his name around from using his father’s surname first and his mother’s surname last to the other way around. This “alias” was supposedly to hide from the authorities. The first issue is that there is a perfectly innocent and much more believable reason for this.
In Spanish usage, the technically proper way of constructing a child’s surname from their father’s and mother’s surname is to place the father’s name first with the conjunctive use of “and” followed by the mother’s name. So properly, if the father’s surname is Gomez and the mother’s surname is Toledo, the child’s name should be something like Jose Gomez y Toledo. In some countries, an “i” or an “e” is used for “and” instead of the more common “y.” I’m not certain as to why this variation in Spanish exists, but I suspect it’s done in areas where the Spanish has been influenced by Sicilian immigration (Sicily was part of Spain for centuries starting in the 12th Century), because “y” and “w” don’t exist in the Sicilian language as vowels the way they do in other Romance languages.
In Anglo-American English usage, the custom is to simply drop the mother’s surname for a child, although in modern feminist-influenced times, we have begun to see the hyphenation of surnames, with the mother’s surname coming first, hyphenated to the father’s surname. This is like what I’m told is the rule in Tagalog (the Phillippines native language), where the mother’s name becomes the middle name and the father’s name the surname (or last name in order).
Both Spanish and English “surname” or family-name order is completely different from a number of Asiatic languages, like Hungarian (from the Finno-Ugric language family) and Chinese. In those languages, the surname is first, followed by the given name. So a common Hungarian name transliterated into English as Zoltan Horvath should properly be Horvath Zoltan, or Mao Zedong in Chinese is really Zedong Mao.
Traditional/classic Semitic languages followed a completely different construction, with the use of “Ben” or “Ibn” for “son of” followed by the father’s name (and the given name appearing first in order, even though to begin with, the languages are written from right to left instead of left to right).
So, getting back to the case at hand, part of my expert witness testimony was to explain to the jury why there was nothing necessarily sinister about changing the order of the defendant’s surnames on the American side of the border. In fact, he’d even disclosed the discrepancy on one of his INS (the former federal agency, Immigration & Naturalization Service) applications for legal residency.
It’s perfectly common in America, historically, for names to get really screwed up or Americanized, depending on one’s point of view, when people immigrate to the United States. The people who interview and process immigrants are clerks, not linguists. As I told the jury in this case, a similar thing happened with my family. My grandfather’s original family name, from Tereshki, Belarus, was “Tokar,” which means millwright in Slavic languages and of course would have been written in the Cyrillic alphabet in the Czar’s old empire. When my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in New York, the name was transliterated and Anglicized rather than being translated into English. It became “Tucker” simply because “Tokar” sounded like “Tucker.” Properly translated it would have become “Turner,” because a “Turner” was a millwright in Old English (literally, one who turns a lathe).
More to come!
In my next blog about this case, there will be more issues, more details about my expert witness testimony, and more on the Archaeology of knowledge that goes into a defense investigation of a very, very old case, including:
- What the police knew
- What the police never followed up on
- Why my client wound up back in Mexico
- What my client did in Mexico
- What my client did after he came back to the United States
- How my client was fingerprinted and not found to have any outstanding warrants REPEATEDLY
Meanwhile, please keep your fingers crossed while the jury’s out. I’m convinced he’s not guilty and should be acquitted. He’s been in jail since May 2009 and his family are the Salt of the Earth!
