Eutiquio Rios was 60 years old when he died on Wednesday, October 7, 2020, in Maywood, a small city in southeast Los Angeles County. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died after sustaining blunt force trauma near 4444 East 61st Street. His death was ruled a homicide, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau took the case.
He was a Latino man who had just turned 60 or was about to. Beyond his name, his age and the place where he died, almost nothing about Eutiquio Rios has been made public. No obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this story, and no news outlet appears to have reported on the death. He surely had family, friends or neighbors who remember who he was, but none of that has entered the public record.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say whether he was beaten in a fight, attacked by a stranger, assaulted indoors or on the street, or struck by a vehicle, all of which can lead to a finding of blunt force trauma. It does not say what time of day he was hurt, whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital, whether anyone saw what happened, or whether investigators ever identified a suspect.
Maywood covers barely more than a square mile, making it one of the smallest cities in Los Angeles County and one of the most densely populated in the United States. Its residents are overwhelmingly Latino, many of them immigrant families living in small houses and apartment buildings on tightly packed blocks between Slauson Avenue and the industrial corridor along the Los Angeles River. In 2010, facing a financial crisis and a scathing state report on its police force, Maywood disbanded its police department and laid off most of its city employees, and it has contracted with the Sheriff's Department for police services ever since.
In a city that small, a homicide is not an everyday event, and neighbors often know one another. Yet the death of a 60-year-old man from blunt force injuries on 61st Street, in the middle of the pandemic, does not appear to have been reported by any news outlet. Homicides rose sharply across Los Angeles County in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, after years of relatively low numbers, and detectives were stretched across a growing caseload. Many of those killings were shootings that drew at least brief coverage on local television.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Eutiquio Rios could be found in news archives or public records. Nearly six years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Someone in Maywood may remember a fight, an argument or a police response on or near 61st Street in early October 2020, and anyone who knew him may hold information that could help detectives. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau at 323-890-5500, or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
