May 21, 2025 • 33 mins
Detectives are confronted with a shocking tragedy involving someone who was instrumental in solving Daisy’s murder. Plus, a source in Mexico helps solve the remaining mysteries about how social media ultimately cracked this case.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I had just started making the show when I learned
that Jeffrey had been murdered. It was just after New
Year's Day twenty twenty four. I had been talking to
Susie on the phone, and when she told me the news,
it felt completely inconceivable. Jeffrey had been the one to
identify Daisy's body. He made sure that she wasn't a
Jane Doe, he testified at Victor's trial. The guilty verdict
(00:26):
was partly because of him. Here's how Detective Sanchez put.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It on The standing was great, that kid was amazing, right,
But if it wasn't for him, it would have been
it would have taken a.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Lot longer, right. And when we talked to him, he
was you know, he wasn't scared. He was you know,
it was forthcoming. I'm just telling what you know, Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
It was one horrific tragedy, one senseless act of violence
that had ended the life of yet another teenager from
the same apartment complex. And so, as I spent the
next few months putting in requests to interview the detectives
on Daisy's case, I realized I had another murder. To
ask them about Jeffrey's usually homicide detectives are the ones
(01:14):
with all the information. They're the ones who get to
choose when to withhold it and when to share it,
whether to put out bulletins on social media or to
work the case without the help of the public. They're
often the ones tasked with delivering horrible, life shattering news,
telling people when someone they love has been murdered. But
(01:36):
when I began talking to Lugo and Sanchez, it became
clear to me that they didn't know about Jeffrey's death,
because when I sat down with each of them, they
spoke about him in the present tense. For example, here's
something that Detective Luco said.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
I'm sure now he's thirteen or fourteen, but at the
time he was ten or eleven, not any older than that.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Very bright Teofrey actually was older than that. He was
thirteen when he identified Daisy's body. He was sixteen when
he died of multiple gunshot wounds. Just three years later,
when Detective Sanchez spoke of him, he said, in the
present tense, he's a young kid.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
You know, I'm not going to tell you I'm how
old he is, but he's a young kid, and he
was very courageous to say, hey, listen, you know I
think I know who that is.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
I found myself in this strange situation because now I
was the one who had news to share with the detectives.
I had to tell them that their main witness, the
teenager who helped them solve Daisy's murder, had also been
the victim of a homicide. I didn't really know how
to share this news. Lugo had been on a tight
schedule when we first talked, and I had so many
(02:46):
questions about Daisy's case that it seemed like it wasn't
the right time to ask about another one. Detective Sanchez
and I talked just a few days after that, and
during the end of our conversation, I decided to bring
it up, another case that I wanted to ask you about.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Is it a homicide?
Speaker 5 (03:04):
Yeah, it's a homicide case.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Did I handle it? I don't know. I don't know
who's handling it. Maybe you can tell me who is.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Figuring out the words to say was really tough, so
I decided to pull up a local news article on
my phone. It didn't mention Jeffrey by name, presumably because
he was a minor, but I decided to read the
first couple of lines of it to Sanchez and see
if it rang a bell. A sixteen you old boy
was killed in Compton. The Sheriff's apartments that a man
was also found on the scene who had non life
(03:30):
footing injuries. And so this is the homicide department's number.
I just don't know if you're working this case, and
I'll tell you why. It's not totally random. But so
this case, the sixte year old boy that was killed
was Jeffrey no Way.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Oh wait, it's the first time I've heard it. Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Sanchez and I sat there in the conference room in silence.
He looked visibly uncomfortable. I mean his mouth was literally
hanging open, and his eyes kept darting back and forth
between me and Miguel, who had been sitting next to
me holding the microphone across the table. It was as
if Sanchaz wasn't sure whether we were playing some kind
(04:15):
of sick joke on him. I didn't know what to say.
Finally I broke the silence. Yeah, so, I guess I
would just be curious to know if there's any sort
of headway in that investigation.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Let me look into it. Okay, why did you that
just wrote me part of my French. Yeah, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I'll tell you that. I know, I know I want
to tell you earlier, but I knew it would derail
kind of I.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Want to find out. I know, I know it's so upsetting,
and I'm going to call the mom.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
I know, I really want.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
To know what happened, because I feel like there's things
that happened like that, you know, all over a lay
all the time, and then you never hear about it,
and you're like, what happened.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
To this kid or what was there?
Speaker 3 (05:00):
What was their story? I'm sure you deal with that
a lot too. You put it down. I know me too,
to im not to go fill this thing with vodar.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Oh my god, I know I've been sitting with this knowledge,
and so yeah, I upset about it, but I would
love to know.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
If there's anything, I'll look into it and if the
investigators are willing to talk, I'll forward him to you.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Thank you, because he's a part of Daisy story and
like you said, he's a part of why Victor ended
up getting convicted, you know, yeah, and he was sixteen.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Part of my French. I speak a lot of French.
Edit that might go all right, dude, that's messed up.
She got it like whe's the mom to call? She
would call me.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
You don't know who's working at I have to look okay,
I have to look okay.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So I'll have to ask the guys at the front
desk to say, hey.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Come on, this is your job.
Speaker 6 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
But that kid was a good kid, like and he
you know, so it was Daisy. I know, I know,
I mean, yeah, damn, I remember. I remember walking the
kid into the courtroom.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Like right, like he like he was my kid, like,
you know, hey, don't worry by it, You'll be good.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
That's that's messed up.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
I'm Jen Swan from London Audio iHeartRadio and executive producer
Paris Hilton. This is My Friend Daisy, episode ten Cat Eyes.
After I told Sanchez about Jeffrey, I knew I had
(06:50):
to tell Luco too. He agreed to meet me at
the Homicide Bureau for a follow up interview and that's
when I filled him in on my conversation with Sanchez.
The other thing that I told him during our interview,
and I don't know if he told you too, was
that I found out that Jeffrey, the main witness was murdered. Yes, yeah,
(07:10):
did you know about that?
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Yes, it's very tragic. Yeah, it's such a nice boy.
But he's just a victim of the area, right. I
think it's so dangerous for them in the area. It's
almost heartbreaking that things like this occur in Compton.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Luco's response was surprising to me, especially because when we
first sat down in his office just two weeks earlier,
he gave no indicasion that he knew about this other
homicide case, about how it dovetailed with Daisies, And so
I asked him, do you remember where you were when
you learned about Jeffrey how about his murder? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
I think you're told this here.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Maybe it was the way he hesitated or restated my question,
or maybe it was just the stark difference in his
reaction versus Detective Sanchez's, but I had this feeling that
he was not being honest with me. He'd always been
a little defensive when speaking about Daz's case, and I
understood why. Here I was questioning him about what he'd
(08:21):
been doing during the investigation and why Daisy's friends felt
like they had to start their own. But I guess
I thought that since this case wasn't one that he
was working on. He might be a little more forthcoming
with me, but to me, it felt like he was
again assuming the role of the detective with all the answers,
the football coach with all the plays. As we walked
(08:43):
out of the conference room, I began to question other
things that he had told me about Daz's case, about
how he'd been working the investigation, about how difficult it was,
about how exactly Victor had been caught, And I wondered,
could I really trust any of it. In the hallway,
Luco stopped and introduced me to a detective named Joe Purcell.
(09:04):
He's an old timer who trained Luco here that was
about three decades ago.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
It's Jennifer Swan. She's a podcaster. Oh, she used to
write for New York magazine.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, I'm a freelancer doing a doing a podcast about
a story that I covered a couple of years ago. Kidding, Yeah,
put a murdering Compton.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Maybe he didn't mean it that way, but it sounded
like what some of Daisy's neighbors had imagined. The police
might say, a murder in Compton that's never happened before,
Like it was some kind of joke, some kind of punchline.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Compton murder, but we cut the guy at Papa's and beer,
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah? Well, it had been a couple of months and
the family, you know, the family was wondering, what's going
on with this, Why isn't he be arrested, So they
put out their own tiktoks and instagram trying to find him.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
And on the same day.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
I felt like I had to jump in and explain
that the police had gotten this big assist from social media.
They were like putting his photo out. People were calling,
blowing up your cell phone.
Speaker 6 (10:09):
I've seen them.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Here, Yeah, yeah, see him everywhere. And it could be dangerous,
right if the parents in this case it worked out fine,
but I was telling her it could be dangerous if
they wanted to be someone and they put his picture
up as a murder Fero Bank and it turned out
someone else committed the murder.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Lugo was always downplaying the role of social media and
solving this case. Like when I first interviewed him in
this office just a couple weeks earlier, I asked him
about the moment he saw the screenshot showing Victor at
Papa's and beer. He told me he barely saw it.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
It came. Yeah, I remember seeing it late in the evening.
Maybe we're so busy during this time and I remember
seeing something to that effect. And we already knew where
he was at. And we're not here too. And I
(11:08):
told you this already, Jennifer, our relationship we wanted to be.
Those are our victims, right, Susie has suffered enough, and
I know she was upset for a time because nothing
was being done. But we have to wait to make
sure that we have to be able to prove it.
Speaker 7 (11:30):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
We can't just arrest someone and then we have to
cut him loose and then he leads to a country
that we don't have a treaty with and we'll never
get him back.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right, Okay, maybe it's worth pointing out that Lugo actually
did have proof. This is based on his own admission
he had the DNA match. Sanchez confirmed this when he
gave testimony a trial. He said the code has hit
came back less than two and a half weeks after
Daisy's murder. The first results came back on March twelfth,
(12:04):
and the official letter from the California Department of Justice
that came back March eighteenth. Anyway, I was curious about
the screenshop about how it led to Victor's arrest, But
when I asked Lugo about it, he seemed almost agitated
by the question.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
I want to get in an argument, and if they
think they had a lot to do with it, I
want them to It's okay, right, it takes team and whatever.
But we know what we did, we know who we
talked to, we know the fly Once the flyer went
out with with the arrest and wanted all over social media,
(12:44):
that's when things happen. But if they want to believe
that it was them and all them, that's okay too.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
This flyer that he's talking about, it's the one the
Sheriff's department put out on Facebook. Lugo is saying that
it was this social media post that led to Vic's arrest,
not the ones put out by Dezi's friends and family,
but those tiktoks had apparently made an impression on the detectives.
That's at least according to Victor. When I interviewed him recently,
(13:14):
he told me that when he came into the office
for his interrogation, which you know, never actually happened because
Victor didn't know what a lawyer was. He told me
that that was true. The detectives, he claimed, had teased
him for being famous on TikTok. Here's how Victor says
that conversation went. How did you become aware that they
(13:35):
were looking for you on TikTok?
Speaker 5 (13:37):
The detective told me, there's just coledy names call me
that all your scens like you were on tiktog.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So what really happened? Did Victor get arrested because he
was TikTok famous? Was it the Instagram DM that led
to his arrest or was it the voicemail that Sanchez
said that he got that very same morning that Susie
saw the screenshot. I realized I wasn't going to get
(14:14):
a straight answer out of the detectives. If I really
wanted to get answers, I had to take matters into
my own hands. I had to go to the scene
of Victor's arrest. I showed up to Papa's and Beer
on a weekday afternoon. It was the off season, and
(14:36):
the bar was nearly empty, which was honestly a little
weird for a place that feels a bit like a
cruise ship docked on the beach. There's the sprawling outdoor area,
and there's clusters of tables surrounding a mechanical bull and
a live music stage that sits directly on the sand.
I ended up taking a seat inside. It was kind
of a smaller area. It felt more like a sports bar,
(14:57):
with wood paneled countertops, big screen TV, and loud reggae
and rap music blasting over the speakers. I ordered nachos
and I started talking to the bartender, and when I
told him about why I was there, his eyes lit up.
He had followed Victor's murder case. He'd even tracked down
news footage from the trial.
Speaker 7 (15:18):
When I see his MoMA in the news, she touched
my face.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
She touched your feelings.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Daisy's mother.
Speaker 7 (15:26):
Yeah, it's life, innocent life.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
It's hard when we lose innocent life. The bartender said
he didn't want to be identified by name, so I'm
just going to refer to him as the bartender. He
said that he felt for Daisy's mother and for Victor's
that he was shocked by the details that emerged a trial,
and the reason he was so invested, the reason he
wanted to see how the story had ended is because
(15:54):
he himself had been part of it. Victor had been
his co worker.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Nice guys, relaxed, He's coming and ki, yeah, nobody is
a spell. Nobody No, why when we not?
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Nobody had suspected that he'd been hiding in plain sight
after committing a murder across the border. I mean, the
bartender did think it was a little weird that his
new coworker came from the US to work in Mexico
essentially as a food runner, especially because he really didn't
even speak much Spanish. But the bartender never questioned the
only two things he thought he knew about his coworker,
(16:33):
that his name was Billy and that he was from Arizona,
Both of course, would turn out to be lies. Anything
else than to.
Speaker 7 (16:42):
See the kid well else, he's really don't talk to nobody.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Billy the kid, the wild West outlaw who went on
the run after committing a series of murders. It was
the nickname this bartender had given to Victor, having no
idea just how fitting it really was. The bartender's main
impression of him was just that he kept to himself
except for when he was drinking. That's when he became
(17:09):
an entirely different person. The bartender described this version of
Victor as aggressive, violent, unpredictable.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
How long is he for?
Speaker 7 (17:20):
He's coming by in April?
Speaker 4 (17:24):
April?
Speaker 7 (17:25):
April, yes, the first nation of April. Three months when
the police second, I think, see.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeh three months. Wow, that's a while.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Did he ever?
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Do you think he ever went back and forth?
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Because people kept saying they saw him in a lay,
but maybe they saw somebody else.
Speaker 7 (17:44):
They think of somebody else.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Left, so you think he never left once he got.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Here, No, he was here.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Out. Just how many months Victor had been in Mexico
made me rethink so much of what I thought I
knew about the hunt for him. It meant that all
of those sightings of Victor all around southern California and
all of these surrounding states, they were sightings of guys
who weren't actually Victor. It made me think of people
like Valerie Ariano. She went to high school with Daisy,
(18:23):
and she thought she may have seen Victor on the
train platform. She and so many others were on high
alert for months, watching their backs around Compton in southeast LA.
And it also made me think of the skateboarders, or
maybe the guys with gauged ears who had repeatedly been
mistaken for a murderer. I thought about what could have
happened if someone had tried to capture the wrong person.
(18:46):
When I talked to Victor on the phone, he didn't
specify exactly when he left for Mexico. He just said
that he had been eating breakfast one morning at a
shopping center, which is really casual, right, and he met
someone who was on their way to Mexico. Victor suspected
that authorities might be looking for him, and so he
decided to catch a bus with this person. He claimed
(19:09):
that he later discovered he'd been recruited into some kind
of drug smuggling operation, so he ran away. Next thing
he knew, he found himself bussing tables at Papa's and beer.
I can't confirm this story, but it did make a
lot of sense what the bartender was telling me, which
is that Victor had been in Mexico nearly the whole
time he'd been on the run, sticking around La or
(19:32):
crossing back and forth across the border. It would have
been risky for someone who had just committed a heinous crime.
Then again, it was also risky to be working at
a tourist bar. That's something the bartender couldn't quite figure
out either.
Speaker 8 (19:46):
I don't understand why he's coming in and work in
this places.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, that's a strange place because it's so visible public.
Speaker 8 (19:55):
Yeah, yeah, exactly when he's busy right here in a
thousands of coming here for RelA for everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
You know. It's kind of wild to me that Victor
went under the radar for as long as he did
while working in such a popular place. But eventually his
past caught up with him, as it almost always does.
He was having beers with some coworkers after work. The
busy season of spring break had finally ended and they
were looking to relax. The bartender I talked to told
(20:23):
me that he usually didn't like to go out drinking
with his coworkers, but that night he made an exception.
He got a bottle of tequila for the table everyone
was celebrating. One of his coworkers decided to film a
video of the group, and I should point out that
this was actually a different co worker than the one
who sent that video to the Justice for Daisy Instagram page.
(20:45):
The guy who took this video he didn't know at
the time that the food runner known as Billy was
wanted for murder. Nobody did. He took the video, I
assume for the same reason that anyone does. He wanted
content for the Graham, something to post on the feed.
Evidence of a good time had On a sunny, breezy
morning in early July, the good times came to an end.
(21:09):
Victor showed up to work in the morning. It was
July second, and he began sweeping the streets. It was
part of his job to clean the windows and all
the outdoor areas of the bar. That's when the Rosariedo
police pulled up, got out of the car and handcuffed Victor.
The bartender had no idea what was going on. He
just remembered that the arrest happened really quickly. There was
(21:30):
no big struggle, there was no argument. It was all
over in a minute, the bartender said. His boss later
pulled him aside. He looked distraught. He'd come across a
video on TikTok and discovered that Billy the kid was
actually Victor the fugitive. So he called the police and
then he felt bad about it. The bartender said he
(21:52):
tried to comfort his boss.
Speaker 8 (21:53):
My last He feels sad because he reported clearly, I
gave you a cat in the genroom.
Speaker 7 (22:00):
You're doing great, You're doing justice.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
That's it. The rest is history.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
The rest, he said, is history. But the more I
dug into that history, the more I talk to people
in all these different places, the more complex it became.
I had come down to Mexico in search of the
definitive story of how Victor came to be arrested. I
(22:26):
had been thinking that there were only a couple of
possible explanations, and I was hoping that whoever I talked
to at the bar might be able to confirm one
of them from me. It was either the Instagram DM
or it was the phone call that Sanche said he
got as a result of the sheriff's Facebook post. But
here I was at the bar presented with a third scenario.
(22:48):
Victor's boss had seen Daisy's friends TikTok and he called
the police on him. Maybe Victor, being TikTok famous, did
have a lot to do with his arrest. I mean,
it's possible that all of these scenarios unfolded roughly at
the same time. Maybe there's no way to know for sure.
But what seems clear to me is that in all
of these scenarios, the arrest was a direct result of
(23:09):
social media. Whether it was a TikTok or an Instagram
DM or a Facebook post, the influence of these platforms
was huge. And maybe it's cheesy to say, but it
really is a testament to the power of the Internet,
of social media, of information traveling and converging at exactly
the right moment, being seen by exactly the right people,
(23:33):
all of them in different cities, honestly different countries, and
all of them with the same goal of getting justice
for Daisy. And they did it. They found her killer,
and they made sure that nobody would forget Daisy's name
or her story. Jeffrey's mother, Wendy, is still waiting on
(23:56):
justice and wondering what that might look like in her
son's case. I reached out to both detectives assigned to it.
They said it was an active investigation and that they
couldn't comment on it. I also submitted multiple public records requests.
I wanted to get police reports from that day. They
all got denied for the same reason. They told me
(24:16):
it was an ongoing investigation. Then I requested a copy
of Jeffrey's autopsy report.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
Thank you for calling the Medical Examiner's office. This is
the record seption.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
How can I help you?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
The LA County Medical Examiner Building is on the east
side of La kind of near where the five and
the ten freeways meet. It's housed in this brick building
from the early nineteen hundreds, and it's got marble walls
and these big chandeliers. The place looks regal, but inside
people are having some of the worst days of their lives.
(24:53):
They come here to get autopsy reports, but also to
do things like collect their loved ones belonging after they've
been sent to the morgue. It's pretty heart wrenching stuff.
I waited in the lobby and then I was escorted
down into the basement where all the records are stored.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Do you want to do card?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Yeah, I'll do a card.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I handed over my credit card and I was given
a manila envelope. I walked down the hallway, took a
seat on a wooden bench, and opened up the envelope.
I started thumbing through the report. It was about thirty
pages long, and as I flipped through it, I found
a summary of what detectives believe happened on the day
that Jeffrey was killed, which is this. Jeffrey and a
(25:38):
few friends had ordered a pizza. When the pizza delivery
guy got there. This is according to the report, Jeffrey
and another friend flashed guns and attempted to steal his
jewelry and cash. At some point, the pizza delivery guy
apparently took hold of one of the guns. One of
Jeffrey's friends ran away, and at some point about a
dozen shots were fired. The police know this because of
(26:00):
the bullet casings they found on the ground. Most were
from a rifle, some were from a handgun. But that's
about all the authorities know for certain. That and the
fact that three different bullets pierced Jeffrey's body, one in
his arm, one in his chest, one in his head.
(26:21):
As far as I know, the police have not charged
anyone for Jeffrey's murder. Again, they've told me that the
investigation is ongoing. This is also what they've told Wendy,
his mother. One way that she's been attempting to process
her grief is by posting videos of Jeffrey on TikTok.
By remembering the good times and sharing them with others, Oh,
(26:44):
I can see the brown in your eyes.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Let me see.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Even the day.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
No wither than I even have I.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
This video was taken at the Mall food court. Jeffrey
was wearing a white hoodie and sipping on a purple
smoothie and.
Speaker 6 (27:06):
That day, I remember we were sitting and then I
was recording him and I told him, I'm like, dude,
you don't even have green eyes. I see all brown
and just like teasing him around and he's like, he's
like gos shay and everything. And I'm like, Jeffrey, let
me see your eyes. And he's like he's like hiding.
He's like, no, man, stop, and I'm like, let.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Me see how old this either? Uh? This was?
Speaker 6 (27:30):
It was last year, last year, Yeah, the beginning of
last year, February twenty three.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
It was filmed on February twenty third, twenty twenty three.
It only hit me later that that date was the
anniversary of Daisy's death. It was exactly two years to
the day after Jeffrey identified her body. The day after
his death, Wendy uploaded this video to TikTok. She put
a sentimental music track over it. The lyrics went, I
(28:00):
didn't know today would be your last. Jeffrey's smiling and
laughing in the video. When he looks into the camera,
his eyes are of course green. Ri I p Miohito
Stigato when they wrote on the video and little cat eyes.
Speaker 6 (28:16):
I didn't have any followers. I just started my page
and I started with my with my little dog, Yeah,
with the lit my little dog, my kids, that this
little chick that I have. Then I just posted a
few videos of my mom after that when she found away,
and then that was the first video that I posted
(28:37):
of Jeffrey, which was that one was the one that
went by has a million views? Does I'm telling you
that's why. That's why I noticed it went viral. And
then I got a lot.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Of how you think viral?
Speaker 6 (28:47):
I don't know. I don't even know.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (28:51):
I don't know how they go viral, But I guess
it started popping up on everybody's life for you page
or something.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
That's right. This video has over a million views. It
reminded me of something that Sarah Turney, that true crime
TikToker and podcaster I spoke to in the first episode,
told me. She said that TikTok It's kind of like
a slot machine and you never really know what's going
to hit, what's going to be rewarded by the algorithm.
(29:18):
In Wendy's case, it was this short clip of her
son just being himself, being a kid in a food
court with his mom. Wendy wasn't using TikTok to try
to find his killer. It wasn't a call to action.
It was simply a way of remembering Jeffrey and maybe
(29:40):
of finding comfort from strangers. Wendy scrolled through her phone
and showed me more photos of Jeffrey over the years.
Speaker 6 (29:48):
Some of them were goofy.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
They captured these random, silly moments at home.
Speaker 6 (29:52):
Oh, I found a video the other day. I was
going through my pictures and then I saw a video
of He's like, yeah, I'm a YouTuber, and my mom
mad because I don't give her her phone back. I
did what you're doing it on my phone?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
I was like, of course, I want my phone. Was
he actually a YouTuber? Was not? No?
Speaker 6 (30:11):
What he was I guess he was like he wanted
to be your YouTuber. He's like, hey, guys, welcome to
my YouTube channel. And I don't know what, like this
is my famous YouTuber I'm like, dude, you're not even
anything yet.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And there were other photos and videos that marked these
big milestones.
Speaker 6 (30:27):
Where was that. He's all dresseduff he got he graduated.
That's when he graduated from middle school.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
He looks very serious.
Speaker 6 (30:37):
He was mad because I was having him close everywhere.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
At the park.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
He's like another photo.
Speaker 6 (30:43):
Yeah, He's like, Mom, just take one or two pictures
and that's it. Because it was holl looks like, Mom stopped,
it's a already.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
And now I'm that You're glad you have all the photos.
Speaker 6 (30:52):
You know. Yeah, that's what I told my kids. I'm like, dude,
you guys can be mad at me trying to take
pictures or videos. I'm like, that's all I'm gonna keep.
I'm like, you guys are gonna get older and all that,
Like nobody's gonna know anything about you guys. I'm like,
only me.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
I'm like, only me.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
I'll have all the memories.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
This series is dedicated to the memories of Daisy del
and Jeffrey Toinoko. Thank you so much to everyone who
shared their memories of them with me, including Juan Delo,
Daisy's grandfather. He died in late twenty twenty four, and
thank you so much to all of you for listening.
Speaker 9 (31:52):
Hi, everyone, this is Paris. Thanks for listening to My
Friend Daisy. If you are someone you love is experiencing abuse,
you are not alone. Help is available twenty four to seven.
Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free confidential support.
Call eight hundred seven nine to nine seven two three three,
text start to eight eight seven eight eight, or visit
(32:14):
the hotline dot org your safety matters reach out today.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with
support from Sony Music Entertainment. It's reported, written and executive
produced by me Jen Swan. I'm also your host. Our
executive producers for London Audio are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh
Bruce Robertson and Joanna Studebaker. Our executive producer for Sony
(32:44):
Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producer is Zoe Colkin.
Production assistants and translations by Miguel Contreras, Sound design, composing
and mixing by Hans Dale. Shee Lee fact checked this episode.
Joel Ricker is our legal counsel for this series. Our
(33:06):
head of production is Sammy Allison, and our production manager
is Tamika balance Glosni. Special thanks to Steve Akerman, Emily
Rossick and Jamie Myers at Sony, Ben Goldberg and Orley
Greenberg at Uta, and Jen Ortiz at The Cut
I had just started making the show when I learned
that Jeffrey had been murdered. It was just after New
Year's Day twenty twenty four. I had been talking to
Susie on the phone, and when she told me the news,
it felt completely inconceivable. Jeffrey had been the one to
identify Daisy's body. He made sure that she wasn't a
Jane Doe, he testified at Victor's trial. The guilty verdict
(00:26):
was partly because of him. Here's how Detective Sanchez put.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It on The standing was great, that kid was amazing, right,
But if it wasn't for him, it would have been
it would have taken a.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Lot longer, right. And when we talked to him, he
was you know, he wasn't scared. He was you know,
it was forthcoming. I'm just telling what you know, Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
It was one horrific tragedy, one senseless act of violence
that had ended the life of yet another teenager from
the same apartment complex. And so, as I spent the
next few months putting in requests to interview the detectives
on Daisy's case, I realized I had another murder. To
ask them about Jeffrey's usually homicide detectives are the ones
(01:14):
with all the information. They're the ones who get to
choose when to withhold it and when to share it,
whether to put out bulletins on social media or to
work the case without the help of the public. They're
often the ones tasked with delivering horrible, life shattering news,
telling people when someone they love has been murdered. But
(01:36):
when I began talking to Lugo and Sanchez, it became
clear to me that they didn't know about Jeffrey's death,
because when I sat down with each of them, they
spoke about him in the present tense. For example, here's
something that Detective Luco said.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
I'm sure now he's thirteen or fourteen, but at the
time he was ten or eleven, not any older than that.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Very bright Teofrey actually was older than that. He was
thirteen when he identified Daisy's body. He was sixteen when
he died of multiple gunshot wounds. Just three years later,
when Detective Sanchez spoke of him, he said, in the
present tense, he's a young kid.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
You know, I'm not going to tell you I'm how
old he is, but he's a young kid, and he
was very courageous to say, hey, listen, you know I
think I know who that is.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
I found myself in this strange situation because now I
was the one who had news to share with the detectives.
I had to tell them that their main witness, the
teenager who helped them solve Daisy's murder, had also been
the victim of a homicide. I didn't really know how
to share this news. Lugo had been on a tight
schedule when we first talked, and I had so many
(02:46):
questions about Daisy's case that it seemed like it wasn't
the right time to ask about another one. Detective Sanchez
and I talked just a few days after that, and
during the end of our conversation, I decided to bring
it up, another case that I wanted to ask you about.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Is it a homicide?
Speaker 5 (03:04):
Yeah, it's a homicide case.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Did I handle it? I don't know. I don't know
who's handling it. Maybe you can tell me who is.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Figuring out the words to say was really tough, so
I decided to pull up a local news article on
my phone. It didn't mention Jeffrey by name, presumably because
he was a minor, but I decided to read the
first couple of lines of it to Sanchez and see
if it rang a bell. A sixteen you old boy
was killed in Compton. The Sheriff's apartments that a man
was also found on the scene who had non life
(03:30):
footing injuries. And so this is the homicide department's number.
I just don't know if you're working this case, and
I'll tell you why. It's not totally random. But so
this case, the sixte year old boy that was killed
was Jeffrey no Way.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Oh wait, it's the first time I've heard it. Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Sanchez and I sat there in the conference room in silence.
He looked visibly uncomfortable. I mean his mouth was literally
hanging open, and his eyes kept darting back and forth
between me and Miguel, who had been sitting next to
me holding the microphone across the table. It was as
if Sanchaz wasn't sure whether we were playing some kind
(04:15):
of sick joke on him. I didn't know what to say.
Finally I broke the silence. Yeah, so, I guess I
would just be curious to know if there's any sort
of headway in that investigation.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Let me look into it. Okay, why did you that
just wrote me part of my French. Yeah, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I'll tell you that. I know, I know I want
to tell you earlier, but I knew it would derail
kind of I.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Want to find out. I know, I know it's so upsetting,
and I'm going to call the mom.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
I know, I really want.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
To know what happened, because I feel like there's things
that happened like that, you know, all over a lay
all the time, and then you never hear about it,
and you're like, what happened.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
To this kid or what was there?
Speaker 3 (05:00):
What was their story? I'm sure you deal with that
a lot too. You put it down. I know me too,
to im not to go fill this thing with vodar.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Oh my god, I know I've been sitting with this knowledge,
and so yeah, I upset about it, but I would
love to know.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
If there's anything, I'll look into it and if the
investigators are willing to talk, I'll forward him to you.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Thank you, because he's a part of Daisy story and
like you said, he's a part of why Victor ended
up getting convicted, you know, yeah, and he was sixteen.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Part of my French. I speak a lot of French.
Edit that might go all right, dude, that's messed up.
She got it like whe's the mom to call? She
would call me.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
You don't know who's working at I have to look okay,
I have to look okay.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So I'll have to ask the guys at the front
desk to say, hey.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Come on, this is your job.
Speaker 6 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
But that kid was a good kid, like and he
you know, so it was Daisy. I know, I know,
I mean, yeah, damn, I remember. I remember walking the
kid into the courtroom.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Like right, like he like he was my kid, like,
you know, hey, don't worry by it, You'll be good.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
That's that's messed up.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
I'm Jen Swan from London Audio iHeartRadio and executive producer
Paris Hilton. This is My Friend Daisy, episode ten Cat Eyes.
After I told Sanchez about Jeffrey, I knew I had
(06:50):
to tell Luco too. He agreed to meet me at
the Homicide Bureau for a follow up interview and that's
when I filled him in on my conversation with Sanchez.
The other thing that I told him during our interview,
and I don't know if he told you too, was
that I found out that Jeffrey, the main witness was murdered. Yes, yeah,
(07:10):
did you know about that?
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Yes, it's very tragic. Yeah, it's such a nice boy.
But he's just a victim of the area, right. I
think it's so dangerous for them in the area. It's
almost heartbreaking that things like this occur in Compton.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Luco's response was surprising to me, especially because when we
first sat down in his office just two weeks earlier,
he gave no indicasion that he knew about this other
homicide case, about how it dovetailed with Daisies, And so
I asked him, do you remember where you were when
you learned about Jeffrey how about his murder? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
I think you're told this here.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Maybe it was the way he hesitated or restated my question,
or maybe it was just the stark difference in his
reaction versus Detective Sanchez's, but I had this feeling that
he was not being honest with me. He'd always been
a little defensive when speaking about Daz's case, and I
understood why. Here I was questioning him about what he'd
(08:21):
been doing during the investigation and why Daisy's friends felt
like they had to start their own. But I guess
I thought that since this case wasn't one that he
was working on. He might be a little more forthcoming
with me, but to me, it felt like he was
again assuming the role of the detective with all the answers,
the football coach with all the plays. As we walked
(08:43):
out of the conference room, I began to question other
things that he had told me about Daz's case, about
how he'd been working the investigation, about how difficult it was,
about how exactly Victor had been caught, And I wondered,
could I really trust any of it. In the hallway,
Luco stopped and introduced me to a detective named Joe Purcell.
(09:04):
He's an old timer who trained Luco here that was
about three decades ago.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
It's Jennifer Swan. She's a podcaster. Oh, she used to
write for New York magazine.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, I'm a freelancer doing a doing a podcast about
a story that I covered a couple of years ago. Kidding, Yeah,
put a murdering Compton.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Maybe he didn't mean it that way, but it sounded
like what some of Daisy's neighbors had imagined. The police
might say, a murder in Compton that's never happened before,
Like it was some kind of joke, some kind of punchline.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Compton murder, but we cut the guy at Papa's and beer,
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah? Well, it had been a couple of months and
the family, you know, the family was wondering, what's going
on with this, Why isn't he be arrested, So they
put out their own tiktoks and instagram trying to find him.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
And on the same day.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
I felt like I had to jump in and explain
that the police had gotten this big assist from social media.
They were like putting his photo out. People were calling,
blowing up your cell phone.
Speaker 6 (10:09):
I've seen them.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Here, Yeah, yeah, see him everywhere. And it could be dangerous,
right if the parents in this case it worked out fine,
but I was telling her it could be dangerous if
they wanted to be someone and they put his picture
up as a murder Fero Bank and it turned out
someone else committed the murder.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Lugo was always downplaying the role of social media and
solving this case. Like when I first interviewed him in
this office just a couple weeks earlier, I asked him
about the moment he saw the screenshot showing Victor at
Papa's and beer. He told me he barely saw it.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
It came. Yeah, I remember seeing it late in the evening.
Maybe we're so busy during this time and I remember
seeing something to that effect. And we already knew where
he was at. And we're not here too. And I
(11:08):
told you this already, Jennifer, our relationship we wanted to be.
Those are our victims, right, Susie has suffered enough, and
I know she was upset for a time because nothing
was being done. But we have to wait to make
sure that we have to be able to prove it.
Speaker 7 (11:30):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
We can't just arrest someone and then we have to
cut him loose and then he leads to a country
that we don't have a treaty with and we'll never
get him back.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right, Okay, maybe it's worth pointing out that Lugo actually
did have proof. This is based on his own admission
he had the DNA match. Sanchez confirmed this when he
gave testimony a trial. He said the code has hit
came back less than two and a half weeks after
Daisy's murder. The first results came back on March twelfth,
(12:04):
and the official letter from the California Department of Justice
that came back March eighteenth. Anyway, I was curious about
the screenshop about how it led to Victor's arrest, But
when I asked Lugo about it, he seemed almost agitated
by the question.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
I want to get in an argument, and if they
think they had a lot to do with it, I
want them to It's okay, right, it takes team and whatever.
But we know what we did, we know who we
talked to, we know the fly Once the flyer went
out with with the arrest and wanted all over social media,
(12:44):
that's when things happen. But if they want to believe
that it was them and all them, that's okay too.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
This flyer that he's talking about, it's the one the
Sheriff's department put out on Facebook. Lugo is saying that
it was this social media post that led to Vic's arrest,
not the ones put out by Dezi's friends and family,
but those tiktoks had apparently made an impression on the detectives.
That's at least according to Victor. When I interviewed him recently,
(13:14):
he told me that when he came into the office
for his interrogation, which you know, never actually happened because
Victor didn't know what a lawyer was. He told me
that that was true. The detectives, he claimed, had teased
him for being famous on TikTok. Here's how Victor says
that conversation went. How did you become aware that they
(13:35):
were looking for you on TikTok?
Speaker 5 (13:37):
The detective told me, there's just coledy names call me
that all your scens like you were on tiktog.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So what really happened? Did Victor get arrested because he
was TikTok famous? Was it the Instagram DM that led
to his arrest or was it the voicemail that Sanchez
said that he got that very same morning that Susie
saw the screenshot. I realized I wasn't going to get
(14:14):
a straight answer out of the detectives. If I really
wanted to get answers, I had to take matters into
my own hands. I had to go to the scene
of Victor's arrest. I showed up to Papa's and Beer
on a weekday afternoon. It was the off season, and
(14:36):
the bar was nearly empty, which was honestly a little
weird for a place that feels a bit like a
cruise ship docked on the beach. There's the sprawling outdoor area,
and there's clusters of tables surrounding a mechanical bull and
a live music stage that sits directly on the sand.
I ended up taking a seat inside. It was kind
of a smaller area. It felt more like a sports bar,
(14:57):
with wood paneled countertops, big screen TV, and loud reggae
and rap music blasting over the speakers. I ordered nachos
and I started talking to the bartender, and when I
told him about why I was there, his eyes lit up.
He had followed Victor's murder case. He'd even tracked down
news footage from the trial.
Speaker 7 (15:18):
When I see his MoMA in the news, she touched
my face.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
She touched your feelings.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Daisy's mother.
Speaker 7 (15:26):
Yeah, it's life, innocent life.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
It's hard when we lose innocent life. The bartender said
he didn't want to be identified by name, so I'm
just going to refer to him as the bartender. He
said that he felt for Daisy's mother and for Victor's
that he was shocked by the details that emerged a trial,
and the reason he was so invested, the reason he
wanted to see how the story had ended is because
(15:54):
he himself had been part of it. Victor had been
his co worker.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Nice guys, relaxed, He's coming and ki, yeah, nobody is
a spell. Nobody No, why when we not?
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Nobody had suspected that he'd been hiding in plain sight
after committing a murder across the border. I mean, the
bartender did think it was a little weird that his
new coworker came from the US to work in Mexico
essentially as a food runner, especially because he really didn't
even speak much Spanish. But the bartender never questioned the
only two things he thought he knew about his coworker,
(16:33):
that his name was Billy and that he was from Arizona,
Both of course, would turn out to be lies. Anything
else than to.
Speaker 7 (16:42):
See the kid well else, he's really don't talk to nobody.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Billy the kid, the wild West outlaw who went on
the run after committing a series of murders. It was
the nickname this bartender had given to Victor, having no
idea just how fitting it really was. The bartender's main
impression of him was just that he kept to himself
except for when he was drinking. That's when he became
(17:09):
an entirely different person. The bartender described this version of
Victor as aggressive, violent, unpredictable.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
How long is he for?
Speaker 7 (17:20):
He's coming by in April?
Speaker 4 (17:24):
April?
Speaker 7 (17:25):
April, yes, the first nation of April. Three months when
the police second, I think, see.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeh three months. Wow, that's a while.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Did he ever?
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Do you think he ever went back and forth?
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Because people kept saying they saw him in a lay,
but maybe they saw somebody else.
Speaker 7 (17:44):
They think of somebody else.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Left, so you think he never left once he got.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Here, No, he was here.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Out. Just how many months Victor had been in Mexico
made me rethink so much of what I thought I
knew about the hunt for him. It meant that all
of those sightings of Victor all around southern California and
all of these surrounding states, they were sightings of guys
who weren't actually Victor. It made me think of people
like Valerie Ariano. She went to high school with Daisy,
(18:23):
and she thought she may have seen Victor on the
train platform. She and so many others were on high
alert for months, watching their backs around Compton in southeast LA.
And it also made me think of the skateboarders, or
maybe the guys with gauged ears who had repeatedly been
mistaken for a murderer. I thought about what could have
happened if someone had tried to capture the wrong person.
(18:46):
When I talked to Victor on the phone, he didn't
specify exactly when he left for Mexico. He just said
that he had been eating breakfast one morning at a
shopping center, which is really casual, right, and he met
someone who was on their way to Mexico. Victor suspected
that authorities might be looking for him, and so he
decided to catch a bus with this person. He claimed
(19:09):
that he later discovered he'd been recruited into some kind
of drug smuggling operation, so he ran away. Next thing
he knew, he found himself bussing tables at Papa's and beer.
I can't confirm this story, but it did make a
lot of sense what the bartender was telling me, which
is that Victor had been in Mexico nearly the whole
time he'd been on the run, sticking around La or
(19:32):
crossing back and forth across the border. It would have
been risky for someone who had just committed a heinous crime.
Then again, it was also risky to be working at
a tourist bar. That's something the bartender couldn't quite figure
out either.
Speaker 8 (19:46):
I don't understand why he's coming in and work in
this places.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, that's a strange place because it's so visible public.
Speaker 8 (19:55):
Yeah, yeah, exactly when he's busy right here in a
thousands of coming here for RelA for everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
You know. It's kind of wild to me that Victor
went under the radar for as long as he did
while working in such a popular place. But eventually his
past caught up with him, as it almost always does.
He was having beers with some coworkers after work. The
busy season of spring break had finally ended and they
were looking to relax. The bartender I talked to told
(20:23):
me that he usually didn't like to go out drinking
with his coworkers, but that night he made an exception.
He got a bottle of tequila for the table everyone
was celebrating. One of his coworkers decided to film a
video of the group, and I should point out that
this was actually a different co worker than the one
who sent that video to the Justice for Daisy Instagram page.
(20:45):
The guy who took this video he didn't know at
the time that the food runner known as Billy was
wanted for murder. Nobody did. He took the video, I
assume for the same reason that anyone does. He wanted
content for the Graham, something to post on the feed.
Evidence of a good time had On a sunny, breezy
morning in early July, the good times came to an end.
(21:09):
Victor showed up to work in the morning. It was
July second, and he began sweeping the streets. It was
part of his job to clean the windows and all
the outdoor areas of the bar. That's when the Rosariedo
police pulled up, got out of the car and handcuffed Victor.
The bartender had no idea what was going on. He
just remembered that the arrest happened really quickly. There was
(21:30):
no big struggle, there was no argument. It was all
over in a minute, the bartender said. His boss later
pulled him aside. He looked distraught. He'd come across a
video on TikTok and discovered that Billy the kid was
actually Victor the fugitive. So he called the police and
then he felt bad about it. The bartender said he
(21:52):
tried to comfort his boss.
Speaker 8 (21:53):
My last He feels sad because he reported clearly, I
gave you a cat in the genroom.
Speaker 7 (22:00):
You're doing great, You're doing justice.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
That's it. The rest is history.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
The rest, he said, is history. But the more I
dug into that history, the more I talk to people
in all these different places, the more complex it became.
I had come down to Mexico in search of the
definitive story of how Victor came to be arrested. I
(22:26):
had been thinking that there were only a couple of
possible explanations, and I was hoping that whoever I talked
to at the bar might be able to confirm one
of them from me. It was either the Instagram DM
or it was the phone call that Sanche said he
got as a result of the sheriff's Facebook post. But
here I was at the bar presented with a third scenario.
(22:48):
Victor's boss had seen Daisy's friends TikTok and he called
the police on him. Maybe Victor, being TikTok famous, did
have a lot to do with his arrest. I mean,
it's possible that all of these scenarios unfolded roughly at
the same time. Maybe there's no way to know for sure.
But what seems clear to me is that in all
of these scenarios, the arrest was a direct result of
(23:09):
social media. Whether it was a TikTok or an Instagram
DM or a Facebook post, the influence of these platforms
was huge. And maybe it's cheesy to say, but it
really is a testament to the power of the Internet,
of social media, of information traveling and converging at exactly
the right moment, being seen by exactly the right people,
(23:33):
all of them in different cities, honestly different countries, and
all of them with the same goal of getting justice
for Daisy. And they did it. They found her killer,
and they made sure that nobody would forget Daisy's name
or her story. Jeffrey's mother, Wendy, is still waiting on
(23:56):
justice and wondering what that might look like in her
son's case. I reached out to both detectives assigned to it.
They said it was an active investigation and that they
couldn't comment on it. I also submitted multiple public records requests.
I wanted to get police reports from that day. They
all got denied for the same reason. They told me
(24:16):
it was an ongoing investigation. Then I requested a copy
of Jeffrey's autopsy report.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
Thank you for calling the Medical Examiner's office. This is
the record seption.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
How can I help you?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
The LA County Medical Examiner Building is on the east
side of La kind of near where the five and
the ten freeways meet. It's housed in this brick building
from the early nineteen hundreds, and it's got marble walls
and these big chandeliers. The place looks regal, but inside
people are having some of the worst days of their lives.
(24:53):
They come here to get autopsy reports, but also to
do things like collect their loved ones belonging after they've
been sent to the morgue. It's pretty heart wrenching stuff.
I waited in the lobby and then I was escorted
down into the basement where all the records are stored.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Do you want to do card?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Yeah, I'll do a card.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I handed over my credit card and I was given
a manila envelope. I walked down the hallway, took a
seat on a wooden bench, and opened up the envelope.
I started thumbing through the report. It was about thirty
pages long, and as I flipped through it, I found
a summary of what detectives believe happened on the day
that Jeffrey was killed, which is this. Jeffrey and a
(25:38):
few friends had ordered a pizza. When the pizza delivery
guy got there. This is according to the report, Jeffrey
and another friend flashed guns and attempted to steal his
jewelry and cash. At some point, the pizza delivery guy
apparently took hold of one of the guns. One of
Jeffrey's friends ran away, and at some point about a
dozen shots were fired. The police know this because of
(26:00):
the bullet casings they found on the ground. Most were
from a rifle, some were from a handgun. But that's
about all the authorities know for certain. That and the
fact that three different bullets pierced Jeffrey's body, one in
his arm, one in his chest, one in his head.
(26:21):
As far as I know, the police have not charged
anyone for Jeffrey's murder. Again, they've told me that the
investigation is ongoing. This is also what they've told Wendy,
his mother. One way that she's been attempting to process
her grief is by posting videos of Jeffrey on TikTok.
By remembering the good times and sharing them with others, Oh,
(26:44):
I can see the brown in your eyes.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Let me see.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Even the day.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
No wither than I even have I.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
This video was taken at the Mall food court. Jeffrey
was wearing a white hoodie and sipping on a purple
smoothie and.
Speaker 6 (27:06):
That day, I remember we were sitting and then I
was recording him and I told him, I'm like, dude,
you don't even have green eyes. I see all brown
and just like teasing him around and he's like, he's
like gos shay and everything. And I'm like, Jeffrey, let
me see your eyes. And he's like he's like hiding.
He's like, no, man, stop, and I'm like, let.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Me see how old this either? Uh? This was?
Speaker 6 (27:30):
It was last year, last year, Yeah, the beginning of
last year, February twenty three.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
It was filmed on February twenty third, twenty twenty three.
It only hit me later that that date was the
anniversary of Daisy's death. It was exactly two years to
the day after Jeffrey identified her body. The day after
his death, Wendy uploaded this video to TikTok. She put
a sentimental music track over it. The lyrics went, I
(28:00):
didn't know today would be your last. Jeffrey's smiling and
laughing in the video. When he looks into the camera,
his eyes are of course green. Ri I p Miohito
Stigato when they wrote on the video and little cat eyes.
Speaker 6 (28:16):
I didn't have any followers. I just started my page
and I started with my with my little dog, Yeah,
with the lit my little dog, my kids, that this
little chick that I have. Then I just posted a
few videos of my mom after that when she found away,
and then that was the first video that I posted
(28:37):
of Jeffrey, which was that one was the one that
went by has a million views? Does I'm telling you
that's why. That's why I noticed it went viral. And
then I got a lot.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Of how you think viral?
Speaker 6 (28:47):
I don't know. I don't even know.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (28:51):
I don't know how they go viral, But I guess
it started popping up on everybody's life for you page
or something.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
That's right. This video has over a million views. It
reminded me of something that Sarah Turney, that true crime
TikToker and podcaster I spoke to in the first episode,
told me. She said that TikTok It's kind of like
a slot machine and you never really know what's going
to hit, what's going to be rewarded by the algorithm.
(29:18):
In Wendy's case, it was this short clip of her
son just being himself, being a kid in a food
court with his mom. Wendy wasn't using TikTok to try
to find his killer. It wasn't a call to action.
It was simply a way of remembering Jeffrey and maybe
(29:40):
of finding comfort from strangers. Wendy scrolled through her phone
and showed me more photos of Jeffrey over the years.
Speaker 6 (29:48):
Some of them were goofy.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
They captured these random, silly moments at home.
Speaker 6 (29:52):
Oh, I found a video the other day. I was
going through my pictures and then I saw a video
of He's like, yeah, I'm a YouTuber, and my mom
mad because I don't give her her phone back. I
did what you're doing it on my phone?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
I was like, of course, I want my phone. Was
he actually a YouTuber? Was not? No?
Speaker 6 (30:11):
What he was I guess he was like he wanted
to be your YouTuber. He's like, hey, guys, welcome to
my YouTube channel. And I don't know what, like this
is my famous YouTuber I'm like, dude, you're not even
anything yet.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And there were other photos and videos that marked these
big milestones.
Speaker 6 (30:27):
Where was that. He's all dresseduff he got he graduated.
That's when he graduated from middle school.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
He looks very serious.
Speaker 6 (30:37):
He was mad because I was having him close everywhere.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
At the park.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
He's like another photo.
Speaker 6 (30:43):
Yeah, He's like, Mom, just take one or two pictures
and that's it. Because it was holl looks like, Mom stopped,
it's a already.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
And now I'm that You're glad you have all the photos.
Speaker 6 (30:52):
You know. Yeah, that's what I told my kids. I'm like, dude,
you guys can be mad at me trying to take
pictures or videos. I'm like, that's all I'm gonna keep.
I'm like, you guys are gonna get older and all that,
Like nobody's gonna know anything about you guys. I'm like,
only me.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
I'm like, only me.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
I'll have all the memories.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
This series is dedicated to the memories of Daisy del
and Jeffrey Toinoko. Thank you so much to everyone who
shared their memories of them with me, including Juan Delo,
Daisy's grandfather. He died in late twenty twenty four, and
thank you so much to all of you for listening.
Speaker 9 (31:52):
Hi, everyone, this is Paris. Thanks for listening to My
Friend Daisy. If you are someone you love is experiencing abuse,
you are not alone. Help is available twenty four to seven.
Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free confidential support.
Call eight hundred seven nine to nine seven two three three,
text start to eight eight seven eight eight, or visit
(32:14):
the hotline dot org your safety matters reach out today.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with
support from Sony Music Entertainment. It's reported, written and executive
produced by me Jen Swan. I'm also your host. Our
executive producers for London Audio are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh
Bruce Robertson and Joanna Studebaker. Our executive producer for Sony
(32:44):
Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producer is Zoe Colkin.
Production assistants and translations by Miguel Contreras, Sound design, composing
and mixing by Hans Dale. Shee Lee fact checked this episode.
Joel Ricker is our legal counsel for this series. Our
(33:06):
head of production is Sammy Allison, and our production manager
is Tamika balance Glosni. Special thanks to Steve Akerman, Emily
Rossick and Jamie Myers at Sony, Ben Goldberg and Orley
Greenberg at Uta, and Jen Ortiz at The Cut
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