The man, the myth, the murderer

In a working-class neighborhood west of downtown known as Colonia Vicente Guerrero, a young boy lay in the middle of the street waiting for a car or bus to run him over and end his life.

 

But the bus that finally came by stopped inches from him, and a middle-aged woman hopped out and hurriedly approached the boy.

 

“Es Juan!” his grandmother screamed, grabbing young Juan Manuel Alvarez into her arms and scurrying to her house nearby.

 

Two decades later and a country to the north, the 29-year-old Alvarez continues to be haunted by a death wish with catastrophic implications in Southern California that concluded last week with an emotionally exhausting, three-month-long courtroom drama that his attorney likened to Doestoevky’s “Crime and Punishment” with all the key figures caught in mental anguish and moral dilemmas of that classic novel’s killer.

 

Faced with the option of sending him to Death Row, a jury of nine women and three men instead chose a compassionate route of life in prison without the possibility of parole – saying they didn’t believe much of Alvarez’s account of his crime except that he didn’t intend to kill the 11 people who died in the Jan. 26, 2005, Metrolink derailment.

 

Without that intention and relatives’ accounts of how the Alvarez had suffered a childhood of beatings sexual abuse and abandonment, his death wish would go unfulfilled.

 

Prosecutors who argue that Alvarez was a cold-blooded killer who had shown no sincere remorse -- and may have even been attempting to follow in the footsteps of the mythical warrior god who destroyed the world on the same Aztec calendar date that Alvarez caused the deadly train wreck – bit the legal bullet, praised the jury that rejected their case and said they were satisfied with the verdict.

 

No sooner had the sentencing been announced, Alvarez’s wife – whom prosecutors say he created the disaster to impress – said she hoped that in prison he would get the psychiatric help he needed to deal with his hallucinations, delusions and self-destructiveness.

 

“He’s a very sick man,” said Camen Alvarez.

 

To the jury he was a battered soul worth saving. To those who wanted him dead, he is the fulfillment of a blood-thirsty mythological Aztec figure who wanted human sacrifice. To his loved ones, he is a troubled husband, son, cousin. With the trial over, the only thing known for certain about Juan Manuel Alvarez, man and myth, is that he is now a convicted murderer about to enter a hellhole called prison.

 

There are at least two other certainties about Alvarez. He is the child of obsession: His mother’s obsession to a husband who used to beat her unmercilessly; his own obsession to the only woman who apparently loved him, his wife, pregnant by another man and looking for a meal ticket even with her husband going to jail for life; and the obsession of the Mexican mindset to, in the words of the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, hide from the outside world behind masks of solitude.

 

“(The Mexican) passes through life like a man who has been flayed,” Paz wrote. “Everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words. His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats...”

Appeared insincere

That was Alvarez throughout his eight-week trial -- smirking when stony silence might have been best when the jury rendered its guilty verdict, making off-color jokes when good behavior might have been in order when relatives made monitored jailhouse visits just days after his conviction and appearing insincere even as he apologized for his actions from the stand.

 

“He didn’t take this case as a tragedy,” said Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders, who did not believe Alvarez’s act of contrition and remorse, even the hysterical message he left on cousin Beto Alvarez’s phone machine just minutes after causing the Metrolink crash.

“I didn't mean to do this, Beto,” Alvarez wailed. “A lot of innocent people died. I don't deserve to live, Beto. I apologize for everything. Please pray for me.”

Alvarez also can be heard telling his landlord, Reyna Barcena, "I want to die."

 

"It seems so patently made up," Pounders said in discussions with lawyers as to whether the jury should be allowed to hear the recording. "It's almost like someone reading a script. ... What I see here is an appeal for sympathy."

 

But then this had been Alvarez’s fate in life. He never knew what behavior on his part caused his father to whip him without cause. He never why his uncle would rape and sodomize him. He was a man who, even as a child, never knew how to behave, how to react, what was expected of him.

 

“His mother is useless, his father is a monster, and he has nowhere to go," his lead defense lawyer Michael Belter told the jury. "This is the world this man was brought into and was raised in…

 

"To suggest he is anything but a troubled person with deep-seated mental illness is to ignore the obvious… From the moment he was conceived he was unwanted and unloved."

 

And never believed.

A downward spiral

By their own testimony, family members were aware Alvarez was being beaten and sexually abused even as it was happening in his childhood. Yet the hallucinations and nightmares he experienced at the time were treated as the meaningless expressions of a delusional child.

 

"When he was 9 years old, he would always claim there was someone else in the room," Beto recalled. "He would say they would get in bed with him and sleep with him. He would say there was an evil spirit…

 

"(Juan) was there but he really wasn't there. He would look at you but he'd look right through you. He would just stare out to nowhere."

 

No one ever reported the abuse committed on either young Alvarez or on other children and women in the family, and only now does Alvarez’s father, Juan Manuel Alvarez Sr., a former boxer-turned-alcholic-drug-dealer in Mexicali, acknowledge his role in destroying his namesake and his family.

 

“His father admits he was abusive and blames himself for what happened to Juan,” says mitigation specialist Angelica Garza, who interviewed Alvarez’s father in helping his legal defense team prepare its case.

 

Even Beto Alvarez, who rescued Juan and his sister from their abusive environment, doubted his cousin in the incident that, according to his account and that of Alvarez’s wife, may have been a critical turning point in breaking Alvarez’s fragile hold on his life.

 

A year and a half or so before the Metrolink derailment, Alvarez sustained an injury while working on Beto’s construction crew. Attempting to stop a 1,500-pound load of sheetrock from tipping over, Alvarez felt excruciating pain in his hand. With only one good hand, he was unable to work.

 

“I thought he as faking,” says Beto.

 

It was not until Alvarez aggravated the injury on another construction crew that he was finally examined by a doctor who diagnosed a broken hand.

 

By then, though, Alvarez’s life was in a downward spiral.

“This is where the other person came out,” Beto told the jury. “We noticed a change in his attitude,” he said. “It’s what I call a transformation of his life.”

 

Not only was Alvarez unable to work, but, still tied to his machismo upbringing, he was upset that Carmen had taken a waitress job and had become the young family’s main source of support. They began fighting, Alvarez accusing his wife of infidelity, and soon she had kicked him out of their house in Compton and filed a restraining order.

 

Alvarez’s lawyer Belter told the jury that a confluence of “almost unforeseeable triggers” had all kicked in to send Alvarez into an emotional free-fall.

Suicide entry in diary

In a personal diary entry four to five weeks before the derailment, Alvarez wrote about possibly killing himself.

 

“Mr. Alvarez is disintegrating,” Belter told the jury in going over the entry. “His life is falling apart ... He is like one paranoid, over-the-top guy.”

 

On Jan. 26, 2005, Alvarez’s paranoia and disintegration intersected with the lives and dreams of passengers on Metrolink No. 100, which was heading south to Union Station, derailed after plowing into Alvarez’s Jeep, then crashed into northbound Metrolink train No. 901 at the Glendale-Los Angeles city line.

 

In Mexican culture, there are corridos or folk songs of love and death often written in the past about Mexican heroics against Anglo oppressors, especially along the border. No corrido about Juan Alvarez has been written, or likely ever will, unless one considers the almost incredible scenario drawn by prosecutors of Alvarez as an almost supernatural embodiment of an Aztec warmonger.

 

In the prosecution’s opening statement of the sentencing phase, Deputy District Attorney Cathryn Brougham presented jurors a photograph of Alvarez wearing only his underwear to show them small wounds he inflicted after the derailment and a large tattoo on his chest of the Aztec warrior god prosecutors say inspired him to wreak havoc.

 

While Alvarez had been on the stand during the trial, Deputy District Attorney John Monaghan questioned him about his involvement in high school and community college with the Chicano student activist group MEChA and with Aztec rituals, in particular a dance group called Danza Azteca, with which he would don a traditional feathered Aztec headdress, artifacts and loincloth.

 

"And when you went down the (Metrolink) tracks, did you tell someone you carried an eagle's feather with you?" asked Monaghan, referring to the minutes after Alvarez left his vehicle on the tracks.

 

"Yes, I always carried an eagle's feather," said Alvarez.

 

 "And did you tell someone eagles' feathers helped people into the next life?"

 

"Yes," said Alvarez.

 

Unfortunately for race and ethnic relations in the Southwest, that portrayal has been easy fodder for anti-immigration and anti-Latino forces for whom Alvarez has become a poster boy for immigration policies they oppose. One anti-immigrant blog has labeled Alvarez the “MEChA Metrolink Killer.”

 

No one bothered to explain that for many young Latinos of Alvarez’s generation, ethnic studies and ethnic traditions – for some, including folkloric and Aztec dancing – were part of the Chicano Studies curriculum and involvement offered in colleges and universities in California and throughout the Southwest.

 

For Alvarez, that period as a community college student and stint as an Aztec dancer may have been the brief crowning glory of his life He met another student named Carmen Ochoa, whose troubles in her young life may have exceeded even his own.

Ochoa was pregnant with the child of another man, and, according to her own testimony, looking for a husband. She told the court that she had not taken Alvarez’s interest in her seriously because she did not think he would assume the responsibility of raising another’s man’s child – and that another suitor had already left her for that very reason.

 

Two years after they started dating, it was Ochoa who proposed. Their wedding, however, may have been a harbinger of the dark days ahead. They married on Nov. 2, 2000, Dia de los Muertos, a traditional Mexican holiday, and Ochoa wore all black at the ceremony.

 

But by the time, Alvarez’s past and future were being judged in Room 9-303 of the Los Angeles Criminal Courthouse, his life had come to be defined by all the paradoxes that had swirled around his existence: A man with no criminal history committing one of the worst crimes in the city’s history; an unloved man having done his criminal act for love; an emotionally fatherless son whose crime robbed so many children of their own father.

 

“He was the product of a monstrous upbringing,” says Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, whose specialties include criminal behavior, “and now he was being portrayed as the monster who had caused all this devastation and has no remorse.”

 

“No conocen a mijo,” his mother, Leticia Ayala, said softly through her tears just moments after hearing his sentence. “They do not know my son.”

tony.castro@dailynews.com 818-713-3761