Tony Jose Cobos was 73 years old when he died on Friday, October 7, 2005, in Walnut Park. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died after sustaining blunt force trauma at 2558 Cass Place. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department case.
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez told his story weeks later. Cobos was a native of the Galapagos Islands who came to the United States in 1960, fell in love with a woman named Vilma and started a family. He worked as a chef and eventually opened a restaurant in the City of Industry called Nena's. He had moved the family away from Cass Place once, to West Covina, but setbacks brought them back to the house about three years before his death. His family said he wanted to move again, and a house-hunting trip was planned for the second week of October.
His grandson, then 21, told Lopez he was constantly harassed by young men in the neighborhood who asked where he was from. "I don't gangbang, and I don't associate with gang members or anything like that," he said. On October 5, a verbal exchange turned into a fistfight. Two days later, the violence escalated.
"I saw four men in white shirts beating my son, and I didn't know it, but my father was in that pile of men," Cobos' daughter told the Times. Despite his age, he had jumped in to protect his grandson. His daughter said her son was struggling with the driver of a white Cadillac Escalade while her father ran around to the front of the vehicle. He was knocked down, and rather than back up, she said, the driver gunned the SUV and drove over him. "I heard the tires spinning out on his body and his bones crunching," she said.
The Times reported that the suspected driver, identified as Jorge Alverto Vasquez, was wanted in connection with the death. Fearing for their lives, most of the family members who witnessed the killing went into hiding and later left Southern California. His niece would meet Lopez only a couple of blocks away, worried she would be spotted.
Walnut Park is an unincorporated community in southeast Los Angeles County, bordered by Huntington Park and South Gate. It is a densely populated, largely Latino neighborhood of small houses and apartments, patrolled by the Sheriff's Department. A sheriff's deputy was killed on Cass Place in 1992 in a shootout with murder suspects, the Times noted.
Hundreds of people are killed in Los Angeles County every year, and a large share of those killings end without an arrest.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Tony Jose Cobos could be found in news archives or public records. More than 20 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who was on Cass Place in Walnut Park on October 7, 2005, or who knows where the driver of the white Escalade went, may hold information that could help. The Times listed sheriff's numbers 323-890-5583 and 323-890-5634. 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.
