Alvaro Lopezgarcia was 49 years old when he died on Monday, April 15, 2013, in Pico-Union. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died after sustaining blunt force trauma at 1257 S. Hoover St. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department Central Area case.
The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report recorded the basic facts of his death: his name, his age, the date, the address and the cause. It did not publish a story about the case, a quote from a detective or any description of what happened on Hoover Street that day. The few other places where his name appears online simply repeat that entry word for word.
Beyond his name, his age and the place where he died, almost nothing about Alvaro Lopezgarcia 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.
The name itself offers few leads. Written as a single word, Lopezgarcia appears to join two common surnames, which suggests that it may have been recorded differently in other documents, for example as Lopez Garcia or with a hyphen. Searches under the combined spelling turn up only copies of the Homicide Report entry, and both Lopez and Garcia are among the most common surnames in Los Angeles, so records under the separate names could not be tied to him.
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.
Pico-Union lies just west of downtown Los Angeles and takes its name from the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Union Avenue. It is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city, a place of older apartment buildings and small storefronts, with some of the oldest surviving Victorian houses in Los Angeles scattered among them. For decades it has been a first home for many immigrant families arriving in the city. Hoover Street runs north and south through the neighborhood.
By the mid-2010s Los Angeles was recording roughly 250 to 300 homicides a year, among the lowest totals in decades, yet many of those killings still went unsolved.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Alvaro Lopezgarcia could be found in news archives or public records. More than 12 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who lived or worked near Hoover Street in Pico-Union in April 2013, or who knew a 49-year-old man named Alvaro who stopped being seen around that time, may hold information that could help investigators. 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 call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
