Jonathan Stailer Padilla was 19 years old when he died on Saturday, March 1, 2014, in Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died of stab wounds. The coroner's entry, as published by the Los Angeles Times, does not give an address or describe where he was hurt. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department Rampart Division case.
He was a young Latino man, barely out of his teens. Beyond his name, his age and the place where he died, almost nothing about Jonathan Stailer Padilla 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. His middle name, Stailer, is unusual, but his first and last names are very common, and searches turned up only other men named Jonathan Padilla.
None of them is the 19-year-old who died in March 2014.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say whether he was stabbed during a fight or a robbery, attacked by a stranger or by someone he knew, or hurt indoors or on the street. 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.
The only clue to where his death happened is the name of the police division assigned to the case. Rampart Division covers neighborhoods just west of downtown Los Angeles, including Westlake, Pico-Union, Echo Park, Historic Filipinotown and parts of Koreatown and Silver Lake. That suggests he was stabbed, or at least found, somewhere in that part of the city, although the record does not say so directly and the exact place remains unknown.
The Rampart area is one of the most densely populated parts of Los Angeles. It is home to MacArthur Park and Echo Park Lake, to busy commercial corridors such as Alvarado Street, Third Street and Sunset Boulevard, and to thousands of older apartment buildings filled with working families, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Its streets are crowded day and night, which means that on almost any block someone is usually nearby to see or hear what happens.
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 Jonathan Stailer Padilla could be found in news archives or public records. More than 11 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who knew Jonathan, who was with him in the days before March 1, 2014, or who heard talk in the Rampart area about a young man stabbed that weekend, 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 call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
