In the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 24, 2021, the day before Thanksgiving, Alexis Alfredo Corado Polo was run down by a car on a street in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles. He was 27 years old, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, and he died from blunt force trauma.
The call came in at about 2:15 a.m. from the 700 block of East 3rd Street, near Alameda Street. According to a Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson quoted by the Los Angeles Times, two men, both described as 26 years old, had been in an "altercation." When it ended, one of them got into a vehicle and drove it into the other, then fled. CBS Los Angeles reported that the driver jumped into a BMW before running the victim down. Corado Polo was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. LAPD homicide detectives took over the investigation.
The early reports did not name him, and they did not say what the two men had argued about, whether they knew each other, or how the fight began. Police did not release a description of the driver beyond his age, or a plate number for the car. The Medical Examiner later identified the victim as Alexis Alfredo Corado Polo, a Latino man, and listed the location of his death as 707 E. 3rd St. The case was assigned to detectives of the LAPD's Central Bureau.
The stretch of East 3rd Street where he died runs through the Arts District, the former warehouse and rail-yard quarter on the east edge of downtown, just west of the Los Angeles River. Once a district of produce terminals and factories, by 2021 it had become a neighborhood of converted lofts, breweries, restaurants and late-night bars, with streets that stay busy into the early morning on weekends and before holidays. The block near 3rd and Alameda sits at the seam between the Arts District and Little Tokyo.
His death came near the end of one of the deadliest years Los Angeles had seen in a generation. The city recorded 397 homicides in 2021, the most since 2006, according to the Los Angeles Times. Most of those killings were shootings. A man deliberately run down with a car after a street argument is a rarer kind of case, and one in which the person responsible drove away from the scene in a vehicle that witnesses may have seen.
No later news report about an arrest in his death could be found. There is no LAPD press release naming a suspect, no record of a murder charge connected to the case in public news coverage, and the Los Angeles Times Homicide Report entry for him lists no arrest. Nothing found in the public record says whether detectives identified the driver or the BMW.
Somewhere there are people who saw the argument on 3rd Street that night, who saw the car leave, or who know who was behind the wheel. More than four years later, the death of Alexis Alfredo Corado Polo remains, as far as the public record shows, unsolved. Anyone with information about his death can call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247. Tips can also be left anonymously with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
