Alexander Torres was wrongly found guilty of murder in 2001 when he was 20 years old. But after 20 years, the person who drove the getaway car admitted that he and another man committed the crime, not Torres.
Martin Guitron, also known as “Casper,” was in the Compton Varrio Segundo (“CVS”) gang, and Torres lived in the same area. Guitron and Torres didn’t get along and had a couple of hostile encounters before Guitron was shot. The CVS gang went on an intimidation campaign against Torres and his family, trying to force them out of the neighborhood by vandalizing their vehicles. Torres’s home was shot at just a week before Guitron was killed. Also, a few weeks before the murder, someone vandalized Torres’s mom’s car with the name “Casper” on it. Torres confronted Guitron about the vandalism, and they had a fight where Torres fractured his hand badly and had to wear a hard cast.
On December 31, 2000, Guitron was murdered while riding his bike with his friend Enrique Valdovinos. Before shooting Guitron, the shooter kept asking if he was “Casper.”
In 2006, someone called Torres’s family and told them who actually killed Guitron. The getaway driver eventually confessed to Torres’s family that he and someone else shot Guitron and admitted Torres wasn’t involved.
Torres’s lawyers helped the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) find the real killers. The getaway driver’s car matched the description witnesses gave of the car used in the murder, and the shooter he named looked a lot like Torres in terms of age, height, weight, and appearance.
CIU investigators found a medical report from December 19, 2000, when Torres got treatment for his broken hand. The report showed that his cast only allowed limited movement, unlike what witnesses said about the shooter. None of the witnesses said the shooter was wearing a cast.
Because of this new evidence, the Los Angeles District Attorney agreed to vacate and reverse Torres’s conviction on October 19, 2021, and he was released. On April 13, 2022, Judge William C. Ryan declared Alexander Torres innocent.
