Original subtitles

[Adam Bercovici] It was November 15th, 2003.

And I was, uh, you know having a margarita.

And my phone rings,

and it was John Miller, who was our Civilian Deputy Chief at the time.

And I'll never forget what he said. He said,

"How fast can you get 30 guys down to Burbank?"

And I go, "What's up, boss?"

And he says, "I've got one dead and one circling the drain, both Burbank officers."

[Stehr] This stuff doesn't happen in the city of Burbank, and it did.

[sirens wailing]

[Mike Pavelka] What started as the murder of my son,

got bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

[officer 1] They had a direct pipeline source to a super lab from Mexico.

[TV presenter] Rival drug cartels have waged a deadly war...

[TV presenter 2] Victims suffered a violent death.

[TV presenter 1] ...12 more dead bodies.

[policeman 2] Influence and might, they've got it all.

[Mike Pavelka] It was shocking to me, that someone at the top of city government

was swept up in the investigation.

[Bercovici] A lot of people watch The Wire, but we lived it.

[Stehr] Burbank is a nice suburb.

It's a bedroom community.

And of course, we have the studios.

Great little downtown area.

[Stehr] We have a smaller department of approximately 170 officers.

Before the incident, no one during my, uh,

entire time on the department,

had ever been shot and killed.

[multiple gunshots]

[Stehr] It's not one of those days you forget.

At 6:30 in the evening, my cell phone went off.

And it was the watch commander advising me that there'd been a shooting.

And he told me that this one was really bad.

Ah, it looks like we have one officer possibly dead, we have another officer shot,

maybe automatic weapons.

[siren wails]

[Stehr] I had been promoted nine months earlier to captain,

and I was still getting to know um, the job.

I left the restaurant immediately and I just thought, um,

"This really can't be happening."

Came up to the scene which was at the Ramada Inn, on San Fernando road.

It was almost a surreal location. I mean,

there was a sea of police cars and paramedics treating Greg Campbell,

treating Matt Pavelka, our two officers shot.

Greg had a background in military and a background in SWAT.

Everybody knew Greg.

Matt was a newer officer, I believe he had nine months on.

We were trying to figure out what had happened.

Uh, we just didn't know,

I had gotten information that Greg Campbell had pulled into the parking lot.

They made a traffic stop, he requested backup and that's all the information we had.

Last I heard, both officers are in the surgery and being operated on at this time.

[Stehr] I asked someone to take me quickly through the scene.

It was just an overwhelming looking crime scene.

Um, bloody gruesome scene.

[police officer] Around this side, yep.

[Stehr] First thing I noticed, you know, there was a black Escalade.

And on front of the black Escalade, a dead suspect was handcuffed to the front bumper

by the responding officers.

But I felt this probably involved a whole group of people.

Because I saw shell casings, which appeared to be everywhere,

six handguns on the ground,

three car doors open on the suspect vehicle.

There was meth in the car

and I saw an automatic weapon on the front seat.

We were worried about the safety of our neighborhoods.

Because whoever did it, shot two officers.

Obviously they wouldn't hesitate to shoot anybody else.

[police radio chatter]

So due the enormity of the situation,

the amount of outstanding suspects, two officers shot,

um, searches that needed to be done,

Burbank PD could never supply that amount of officers.

I requested outside assistance from our neighboring jurisdictions.

Glendale PD,

Pasadena PD,

Los Angeles Police Department,

California Highway Patrol,

Sheriff's Department, US Marshals, the FBI.

So it was a huge response.

2003, I was the officer-in-charge

of one of LAPD's most elite units,

Major Crimes.

Our unit was created after 9/11, to aggressively

pursue terrorism in LA.

[Bercovici] We did amazing stuff, we got a rocket launcher off the street.

We were kicking doors, grabbing computers, grabbing suspects,

finding Hezbollah and Hamas and Al-Qaeda operatives in the city of Los Angeles.

It was crazy, so crazy that the FBI calls me one time and goes, "Who are you people?"

You know, I did like investigating things.

I liked being able to put the pieces together and

we had surveillance teams and then we also had investigators.

We were all the same unit.

My second night with the unit, I'm in an unmarked Trans Am

with a LAPD guy that I barely know.

And we're going 120 miles an hour, busting intersections.

A helicopter comes down and swoops in.

The guy I'm with is yelling at me, 'cause they've got guns and are pointing them at us.

"Try to get a shot at these guys," and I've got an MP5, I unbuckle my seatbelt,

I stand up in the tee-tops.

And the surrealness of it, I was, like, "This is right out of a movie."

[Bercovici] We were at the top of our game.

But when that day in November arrived, you know, Burbank needed our help.

As we were setting up a perimeter and closing the freeway,

we got word that Matt Pavelka had passed away.

[Stehr] So you have to understand.

We haven't lost an officer in the line of duty for over 50 years, it was...

that shocking of an event for our department.

Matt was a newer officer but he was still part of the Burbank family.

Everybody knew everybody.

Getting that call, being told of what happened in Burbank,

I remember standing up,

and the next thing I know, I'm in the car [laughs] and I'm driving.

[Bercovici] It was like an out of body experience.

Get a page from Adam Bercovici and it was a 911 page.

And I called him.

My first indication that it was a big deal was he was unusually somber.

Adam called and asked me to call people that were underneath us,

so that we would all start responding.

You know, these things are all kinda going through our minds, you know,

you know, "Why are we going to Burbank?"

"Your officer's down, what happened?"

[Applin] The whole drive thinking about the family.

I didn't know him but it became personal

kind of immediately because I was, like, "That's any one of us, you know."

[sighs]

Sorry.

[exhales heavily]

I was...

dreading somebody having to knock on my door.

You know that somebody somewhere is going to somebody's house,

to tell them that their son isn't coming home.

[Mike Pavelka] I had just spoken to Matthew

that evening, just before he went on shift.

'Cause he was supposed to come to Palm Springs the next day and I had set up

a tee time for us to play golf together.

I remember him sitting at the dining table, in the chair on the phone

when they told him that Matt had died.

And he looked at me and he said, "Matt's gone."

So I mean, this was, like, really shocking stuff, how...

how my life and my wife's life had changed in an instant.

[Sue Pavelka] Matt was a jokester, he was always pulling jokes on people.

But he wanted to make his dad proud.

When he was little, he couldn't wait to see his dad in the police car.

Later when he was growing up,

he would stick up for, you know, other... other kids.

That's just all he ever wanted to do, you know,

be in a police car and wear a badge.

His life was going exactly the way he wanted it.

Nice girlfriend, brand new house, even had a new truck and a job he loved.

My wife and I used to talk about it afterwards and say,

if Matthew had to choose which way he would die in his life,

he would want to die in a gun battle.

And don't forget we were kinda told that,

"Greg might not make it, he has a head wound."

And in my mind, I thought, "Boy, you know,

this might not happen once, this might happen twice."

[Stehr] Looking back, I had no idea

of all the drugs that were involved, how many gang members were involved,

how it was actually working drugs for the cartel.

But at that time, we needed to find those responsible for killing Matt Pavelka.

Ah, I think I heard that recording several days after the incident.

Someone had made a copy as they were doing the investigation,

and I'd heard it.

Yeah, it's still tough. Uh, to think that was his... uh, I mean...

Young officer crying for help. He's screaming for help and that's his last words.

[siren wailing]

[police radio chatter]

Well, it was on this corner, I pulled up that night

and it had just stopped raining, that's when I met Tim Stehr.

[Bercovici] I introduced myself, I did not know him. I said, "I'm Adam Bercovici,

I'm from Major Crimes division.

I've got about 100 people coming here, detectives surveillance units."

All of us in law enforcement joined together.

But we all understood from the very beginning that this was Burbank's case.

[police radio chatter]

It was assumed that we were searching for

at least two, maybe three different people.

We got to go, we got to play, we got to move it.

We're on the hunt for a cop killer. I mean, the clock was ticking on us.

[Bercovici] So we had one dead suspect, who was killed in the shooting.

And then the Escalade that the suspects had been in.

But that's the only information or intelligence we have at the time.

Some of the arriving officers were some of our gang detail.

And they recognized the dead suspect.

[Stehr] He says, "I think that's Ramon Aranda.

Think he has a tattoo on him."

Someone had moved his shirt, you could see Aranda was tattooed all the way across.

That's how we were able to confirm that he was a Vineland Boyz gang member.

That's when we need officers that know everything about this gang.

[Bercovici] And that is when I remember Dan Fournier's name came up.

[Fournier] So before 2003,

I was working at first as uniformed gang officer and then detective.

So I knew this gang.

Right here, you can see on the telephone pole.

There's going to be marks like this all over this neighborhood.

But this is how they kinda mark their territory. You guys can see here.

So you got Vineland Boyz, VBS is Vineland Boyz, that sort of thing.

Lets the community know that this is their hood.

So you can see here it's Sun Valley, that's going to be SV.

Sun Valley is pretty much ground zero for Vineland Boyz gang territory.

[Dan] It's on our border of Burbank.

It's in LA's jurisdiction.

You know, but it's close, you know, they're within a mile

of where that shooting took place.

[Bercovici] So we knew the name Vineland Boyz.

But at that point what I remember, is that it was kind of a low-level gang.

[Applin] That gang wasn't on our radar, in the same way

Latin Kings or Bloods or Crips sect would be.

Vineland Boyz wouldn't have been a gang that would jump in my mind as doing this.

I would've thought it would've been MS-13 or some other type of gang.

[dog barking]

Any gang can perform in a violent manner and that includes the Vineland Boyz.

Status. Gang members crave the status,

the recognition, the identification and how do you attain your status?

[Mundo] Anything ranging from burglary to murder.

But as a general rule, you don't attack a cop.

So, if somebody opens fire on a law enforcement unit,

either he's high on dope or he's some young guy

that wants to make a name for his gang.

[man 3] Within two hours of the incident,

we had gotten the registered owner of the Escalade.

Came back to an Ameer Khan.

[Bercovici] When they put him through the system, it came back that he was a

Vineland Boy, in terms of his gang associations.

So one of the first missions that I set our surveillance teams on,

was to go locate that residence and sit on it.

[man 4] All right, 32, I no longer have him, he's all yours.

[woman] Got it.

[Bercovici] One thing we know for sure, Ameer Khan is a Vineland Boy,

Aranda, who's dead, is a Vineland Boy.

It would lead us to believe that our suspects were Vineland Boyz.

[Stehr] It was about a quarter mile north of the Ramada,

we got the biggest break for us.

One of the K-9 teams was sweeping up the freeway,

on the southbound lanes.

And they're the ones that discovered a jacket,

hanging on the fence, next to the freeway.

Inside that jacket had

a magazine, that matched the assault rifle that was in the vehicle.

So that could be an indicator that it was obviously tied to this crime.

[Stehr] And it also had a room key for the Ramada.

It was at this point that John Williams, who was one of my senior supervisors,

was able to go into the Ramada Inn and find out who that keycard came back to.

We went to the manager and she gives us the name of the two people that were in the room.

One is Ramon Aranda, which is

known to be the suspect who was shot and deceased at the scene.

But the other name she gives us is David Garcia.

[Williams] That name is passed on to Diane Kewin, so we can begin to start working him up.

[Diane] So there was more than one David Garcia.

So we got information on the David Garcias

and worked up all the houses, their associates, the family members,

people that they'd been known to hang out with, locations that they've been spotted.

We don't know who the shooter is.

In a case like this, we need an eyewitness.

[Bercovici] Our only eyewitness

is in grave condition, in the hospital

and he may not make it -

Greg Campbell.

My name is Greg Campbell, I'm a retired detective from the Burbank Police Department.

I remember seeing the gun, I remember drawing my weapon and I remember firing it.

So, that evening I shouldn't have been working.

I was going to take my son to Oakland the next day for a Oakland Raiders football game.

And my command staff had given me the night off.

But I didn't want to leave the crew short.

We hit the street about 6:00.

Uh, I wasn't assigned any particular beat in the city, I was a city car all the time.

My first and usual stop was the Ramada Inn at Burbank.

It was dark, it was cold, it was just starting to rain.

[Campbell] I was driving through the parking lot on the north end of the hotel.

And I saw a black Cadillac Escalade.

It was brand new, no license plates.

That could either be because it is brand new or they've taken the plates off of it.

[siren wailing]

[police radio chatter]

[Campbell] It was occupied by two people, smoking marijuana.

I asked for identification from Ramon Aranda who was the driver and the passenger.

But the whole scene, the location we're at, the vehicle they were in,

it just didn't look right.

I called for backup.

They assigned Officer Pavelka.

[Burbank Dispatch] 1L12 back 1L32 Code 6 on a black Escalade at the Ramada Inn.

2900 North San Fernando.

Uh, when he approached, he approached the passenger side.

Then I called the driver to step out of the car.

When he opened the car,

uh, I missed the red flag.

[Campbell] Because typically when somebody opens a car door and they step out of the car,

they rotate out of the car counter-clockwise.

But as Aranda's stepping out of the vehicle,

he rotated to his right in a clockwise manner.

I see his right hand, but the very last thing I see is his left hand.

And I transmitted, you know, "10-32 shots fired, Ramada Inn."

Um, not necessarily his shots, but I was about to fire my gun, I had no doubt.

And then he fired. His first round hit me in the stomach.

When I doubled over, the second shot went into my head.

The bullet fragmented and as soon as that spinal cord was hit,

I went down, completely paralyzed from the neck down.

Pavelka came around to engage Aranda.

After Aranda was down, the passenger got out of the car.

And he engaged Pavelka from the back.

Um...

and I learned this from a security camera that caught part of that shooting.

Standing over him, the passenger emptied his magazine.

And then he changed guns and fired some more.

You know, obviously unnecessary.

He was going to put some bullets into me to kill me,

but he saw the pool of blood that I was lying in and decided that I was dead.

[sirens wailing in distance]

Um...

When the first officer got there,

he thought that I was dead but he reached out and cradled my head.

And apparently when he cradled my head, his finger

to the wound at the back of my head, it, uh... it shook me back into full consciousness.

He said, "We're gonna go out and get these guys right now, you gotta go to the hospital."

I said, "No, I'm gonna go with you." I said, "Just get me on my feet."

I said, "For some reason, I can't stand up."

And I didn't understand the injuries that I had.

So they loaded me in the ambulance and the ambulance got me down to USC.

Just by coincidence that night there were navy surgeons in the hospital,

helping out the other doctors,

dealing with gunshot wounds.

Which probably ultimately saved my life.

The prognosis at the time was that I was going to be paralyzed from the neck down,

for the rest of my life.

Late that evening, Greg Campbell had become conscious.

We were able to show him pictures.

Detectives started showing up with, uh, photographs, six packs.

[Campbell] Finally they showed me one and I said, "Yeah, that's the guy right there."

I said, "He was the passenger."

[Stehr] He positively identified David Garcia

and he also confirmed that it was only two people.

Said if one suspect is dead,

then the only other suspect is David Garcia.

Greg Campbell recovers enough to identify Garcia as the shooter,

now we're in business.

[Diane] You have to do things quickly because they'll be moved

and shuffled and taken by different people, that we don't know who they are.

If the suspect I'm looking for I know is a Vineland Boy, we can look at Vineland Boyz.

[Stehr] Ramon Aranda and David Garcia were Vineland Boyz gang members,

Aranda had been around a lot longer.

David Garcia was 19 at the time of the shooting.

He didn't have the record of some of these people, but he sure was in for the whole...

the whole bang.

I tried to give Matthew advice in my experience

in 30 years on the LAPD and I said "If you get shot"

"on this job, my bet would be that it's going to be

"from a young kid, because they have no..."

"They have no fear."

[Bercovici] We knew that we had to get surveillance assets

into the Vineland Boy neighborhood.

[female police officer] 32, Radio check.

[male police officer] Down Clear, 32.

[Armando] Watching David Garcia's house,

following David Garcia's relatives, following other gang members.

[Bercovici] We needed to start capturing plates, capturing car information,

we needed to get that intelligence.

'Cause he's going to get put into hiding some place.

In a surveillance team, the collective mindset was

to leave no stone unturned.

[male police officer] Keep an eye on sectors five and six.

What surveillance does, it gives you the one-up.

You're able to see what's happening in an area

or see what a suspect or associates are doing, without their knowledge.

[Armando] Family members, girlfriends, associates.

That might be a place where somebody might be hiding.

[Armando] Just had a pedestrian walk up to our location.

Can't tell if he went inside, stand by.

[policeman] Copy that.

And remember, too, that neighborhood was hot.

Hot, hot, hot.

The Vineland Boyz produced David Garcia

and the violent mindsets, where they're going to shoot and kill police officers.

[Armando] 32, this might be a problem.

[policewoman] Roger.

Bad things could happen.

I think it might be one of our players, stand by.

[police radio chatter]

There's no room for error.

Anyone, uh, in the area Bueno Vista

and San Fernando, who hears anything suspicious in their yards,

under no circumstances, should you go outside.

Make sure the doors and windows are locked and secured.

He's very armed and dangerous.

[Albanese] Suspect who was identified was David Garcia.

What he did to Matthew, there are no adjectives to describe it.

[gunshots]

Beyond deplorable, despicable.

To put it in technical terms, the suspect was an evil son of a bitch.

So I was definitely focused on making sure that we kept our head right in the game.

A lot of agencies immediately became involved including the District Attorney's Office.

We were focused on getting the shooter, David Garcia, in custody.

[Richman] I am a judge now but back in 2003 when this shooting took place,

I was a Deputy District Attorney.

It's very unique for a DA, at least in Los Angeles County,

to respond to a crime scene.

But anytime that you have a police officer killed, uh

certain things just get out of control.

[arguing]

As a detective, you know, one of your own was murdered, you wanna...

just, you wanna get this guy.

Burbank Police, which hadn't had an officer killed in 50 years or something like that,

I mean, they were just completely overwhelmed, emotionally.

And then we have to keep emotion out of the situation.

When I... When I showed up that night, there was grief.

You could feel the grief in the air, people were very upset.

And that's a natural human quality to be upset

and to mourn someone you care about, especially a young guy like that.

But we're not gonna act on revenge, nothing to do with revenge.

We were working a complex investigation to to hunt his killer down.

If there is emotion, we need to focus it into professionalism

and into staying on top of things.

[Stehr] Deputy Chief Mike Hillmann from LAPD

was in charge of Metropolitan Division, was in charge of SWAT.

We had aviation units, we had SWAT, we had K-9s,

I had well over 150 police officers from Metro.

[Stehr] He's the one that suggested that, "Why don't you let

our guys do the search warrants?

Because of this level of emotion on your officers."

There were so many names that were thrown out there, the focus was David Garcia.

But there were other minions that we were looking at.

[Hillmann] Was he sequestered with other gang members,

with his girlfriend, with his mother? Don't know.

[Applin] He could be any one of these houses.

He's a member of this gang and these are his people.

He clearly has absolutely zero, zero trepidation about taking on the police.

He's got that "I will kill to get away" mindset.

So this is going to be a tactical problem that requires a SWAT team.

I heard a Burbank detective off to my left,

in the corner talking to one of his colleagues about doing some search warrants

on gang member houses and there were several targets.

Maybe nine or ten or 11, I heard these numbers getting thrown around.

And I thought, "This is probably a place where the FBI SWAT team

might be able to lend a hand."

So I asked Adam, he was, like, "Great idea."

So that's how I ended up going out to my car to get my gear ready.

Checking weapons and flashlights and making sure everything is good.

[dog barking]

[multiple SWAT officers shouting]

[police radio chatter]

It's in the wee hours of morning, SWAT served the warrant

and then we follow in as the investigators after.

Did not find Garcia.

[Williams] But what we did find has all indications that

he had been there and a lot of items were moved out quickly.

We learned that Garcia's brother had taken a number of items that were in his room

and placed them into a green, like, sailor's bag or duffel bag.

And took them across the street to a friend's house and

told him to hide them for him.

We got wind of that and I wrote a warrant to that house.

So we hit that house and we got the duffel bag and

the whole bottom part was filled with ammo.

There was, like, four or five hand guns.

And a fully automatic MAC-10 machine gun pistol.

To us, it's significant, especially being fully automatic.

It means, you pull the trigger and it continues to fire until the gun's empty.

Typically, your average everyday hood is not going to have a weapon like that.

Especially not going to have full automatic capability.

We also found methamphetamine.

Quality of the methamphetamine more of what you'd call ice, it's a more pure form.

And in large amounts.

This is something we typically wouldn't see on the streets, this is indication of

a larger lab, somewhere like in Mexico.

Back in 2003, that normally doesn't happen [laughs].

So all that information came back to us.

That's when we started to realize that we had more than just

some gangsters gone rogue.

We got more than just a simple cop killing. We got something else going down.

[Bruce] All SWAT officers are high risk.

I can remember one of the team leaders once, we had a bunch of gear laid out.

And he asked, "What's the most important gear on the table?"

And a couple of us were, like, "It's this helmet, because if you get shot in the head..."

"No, it's this." And he's, like, "None of that, it's this."

This is life and death, a mistake has serious consequences.

I spent most of my career at Metro and in SWAT.

We were hiring people for what they had between their ears.

First house we hit, it was dark, it was about three or four in the morning.

Got off the running boards and made a nice, quiet stealthy approach.

[Applin] We breached the door.

[SWAT officers shouting]

We had flashbanged the front door.

But there was a second room.

And we were going to flashbang that room,

and as I looked in, I saw what looked like a bassinet.

Even though I'm getting told behind, "Bang it, bang it, bang it,"

I knew the right thing to do was not throw it.

So I stepped out of line like you're trained to do,

and I said, "No bang," and they went in and made entry.

And there was a kid, there was a baby in there.

[police radio chatter]

[dispatcher] 10-4.

First thing I thought was,

"Why isn't somebody in this house screaming for their baby?"

I've been on a lot of search warrants and if there is a kid there,

there's a mama who's coming to get that kid.

Whether they are a hardcore criminal or not, that motherly instinct trumps all.

In this particular case when we asked, "Hey, where's the mom?"

Crickets. "Meh, I don't know." "Where's Mom?"

How did this baby get left in this drug house, with a bunch of gangbangers?

At this point, I realized that not only was this gang pretty violent, right,

but they don't value life the same way that you or I do.

[Fournier] This is what the gang does to people.

A couple of years prior to this, you know, when David Garcia was

you know, a kid, he was on the swim team.

For a 19-year-old to turn into such a ruthless killer... just, unbelievable.

Lot of poverty, a lot of broken homes

and this was just a void.

There's a void in their lives.

This is a brainwashing process that is taking place.

In my case, I felt like I was a nobody.

'Cause my dad treated me like a nobody.

The gang made me somebody.

Somebody special, somebody to be reckoned with.

It's a big lie.

When I committed my first homicide,

I killed a fellow street gang member with a machete.

His head got chopped off.

My state of mind was to unleash

the anger and the fury that I had built inside of me.

Uh, David Garcia, he got sucked in by the Vineland Boyz.

I can't speak for him but I can say that when he opened fire on that police officer,

with intent to kill him,

I don't think, in his mind,

he's really thinking about what he's doing,

and that's what I'm trying to convey - that these guys don't think.

I'm not suggesting that we should feel sympathy for David Garcia.

He committed an irreversible act.

And at the end of the day, if you kill a human being,

you're responsible for that act.

We hit, I think, two houses that first night.

And it was a dry hole, we didn't find David Garcia, he wasn't there.

[Williams] And when we did, I wanted to stay right on top of this thing.

I've been involved in other cases like this,

where as soon as you take the pressure off,

they're gone.

[phone ringing]

- [woman] Hello? - [man speaks in Spanish]

[Stehr] If you're trying to find somebody, you wanna hear what people are saying.

[woman speaking]

[Stehr] So we had wiretapped search warrants.

So we're listening into the family and friends talk, with the judge's permission.

And in those private conversations,

they don't know themselves where David Garcia is.

That is highly... in my experience, highly unusual.

They need some kind of support.

[Applin] Typically was, like, the baby mama house,

somebody that they were connected to,

like a girlfriend or something like that.

And when those people don't know

where this fugitive is - and in this particular case,

David Garcia's own family doesn't know -

that's a real big tell to me,

that he's got a whole other network that he's tapping into.

We begin to think that there's a sophistication involved,

that there's something else going on,

because they're staying off the radar.

I don't know the first time I had the word "cartel"

or that the Vineland Boyz were connected to a cartel.

At the time, we didn't know that, but in retrospect,

a lot of the stuff that we had seen kinda started making sense a little bit.

At that particular time, I had no idea where this was going to go.

My focus was on finding David Garcia.

He could be anywhere in the United States, he could be in Mexico,

he could've gone to Canada, we don't know.

[Stehr] He could be anywhere.