A prominent Mexican Mafia member was wounded in a shooting Saturday that left another dead in Los Angeles County, authorities said.
At 11 pm, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who responded to the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall on Valley View Avenue in La Mirada, where they found two people with gunshot wounds in the parking lot, Lt. Steven De Jong said.
Eric Ortiz, 34, died of a gunshot wound to the chest, De Jong said. The lieutenant declined to release the names of the surviving victims, who remain hospitalized in critical condition. Law enforcement sources who were not authorized to speak publicly identified him as Juan Garcia, a member of the Mexican Mafia known as “Topo.”
De Jong said a group of non-veteran gang members had rented the VFW hall for some type of gathering. Most of the attendees had left by the time police arrived, and De Jong said detectives had “no suspicious information.”
Originally from the Florencia-13 gang, Garcia, 63, served more than 17 years in federal prison for racketeering. He was charged with rioting at the Lompoc prison in 2003.
The riots began after the inmates made several rounds of alcohol called pruno, according to law enforcement reports reviewed by The Times. The lieutenant escorted the prisoner to his office for a breathalyzer test as Garcia walked in front of him.
“You’re not taking anyone,” said the lieutenant, pushing him away. “Den les en la madre“said Garcia to the other inmates in the module, which prison officials interpreted as an order to attack the guards.
Eight inmates attacked the lieutenant, punching, kicking and choking him, the report said. As he and about 40 other staff members tried to escape the cell block, Garcia asked one of the officers to apologize to him.
The officer hesitated. An inmate punched him in the face. “I’m sorry,” he told Garcia, who then left the staff, according to the report. The documents say they brought in a Muslim cleric who was beaten unconscious and a food service worker who was attacked with a broom.
The cell block was emptied of prison officials, Garcia broke all the glass in the module and sprayed fire extinguishers, the report said. With the help of other inmates, he blocked the entrance with a washing machine and vending machine, then destroyed all the televisions, microwaves, sprinkler systems and ice machines. Other inmates also beat inmates who did not participate in the riot, according to the report.
The associate warden issued riot gear and masks to the guards, who quelled the riot with tear gas, pepper spray, and “flash stun” and “multi blast” grenades, the document said. Twenty-eight staff members and four inmates, including Garcia, suffered injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to hernias and serious head trauma.
“This was a show of strength on the part of Garcia’s inmate,” investigators wrote in the report.
After pleading guilty to the crime of rioting in a federal facility, Garcia was sentenced in 2005 to another six years on top of his racketeering term.
A year after his release in 2020, a Los Angeles Police officer was patrolling 64th Street in South LA when he saw a silver Volkswagen Passat double-parked on the wrong side of the street, according to a probation report.
He saw the driver, Garcia, hand a gun to a man standing next to the car, the report said. The man ran away. When police arrested him, the 31-year-old Florencia-13 member appeared “scared to answer my questions and denied knowing Garcia,” the arresting officer wrote in a report.
Convicted of being a felon in possession of a gun, Garcia was sent back to federal prison in 2022 to serve 15 months. Before sentencing, Steve Quinonez, chief executive of the Firestone Community Organization of Florence, wrote in a letter to the judge that Garcia volunteered for his group.
A “great leader with a big heart,” Garcia mentored young people not to take “the wrong path in life,” he wrote.
De Jong, the sheriff’s lieutenant, asked anyone with information about the shooting to contact detectives at (323) 890-5500.
