LAFD Captain Testifies in His Murder Trial

David Del Toro, the former LAFD captain charged with murdering a 42-year-old woman whose body was found two blocks from his home in Eagle Rock in 2006, testified at his trial today afternoon, but all that the jury got to hear was a rambling two-and-a-half-hour account by the defendant about his career—and nothing about the alleged crime, “the meat of the matter,” as Superior Court Judge Lance Ito called it.

Dressed neatly in a dark-blue suit and sporting a blue tie, Del Toro, 54, looked surprisingly calm and confident for someone faced with a large body of incriminating evidence presented to the jury from the crime scene as well as his house, not to mention a tape-recorded interview with LAPD detectives in which jurors heard the veteran firefighter saying to himself that he had “f-----g killed” the victim, Jennifer Flores.

Del Toro’s testimony began with numerous biographical details, including his childhood as the youngest of 10 siblings in South Central L.A. and later in Highland Park. He played football at Franklin High School, graduating in 1974, and went on to earn a degree in health science at East L.A. College. His dream, he said was to become a physical therapist for the now-defunct Los Angeles Rams football team, but he ended up becoming a firefighter in 1983 at the age of 26.

Despite at least half-a-dozen objections by Deputy District Attorney Robert Grace that the information about Del Toro’s youth and career was irrelevant to the case, Ito allowed defense lawyer Joseph Gutierrez to continue with most of his questions because, said the judge, the jury was entitled to know who the defendant is. But a little more than an hour into the testimony, Ito reminded Gutierrez that "we've yet to touch on August 16th"—the date in 2006 when Flores' mangled and almost nude body was found on Loleta Avenue, a quarter mile from Del Toro's house.

The picture that emerged from Gutierrez’s inquiries was of an accomplished—but overworked—firefighter who appeared to be dedicated to his job and who had served in some of the roughest neighborhoods of the city, starting out in Skid Row and the Garment District and then moving on to Hollywood, Silver Lake and Lincoln Heights. As a captain, Del Toro routinely worked a string of 24-hour shifts—in the first two weeks of July 2006, for example, he logged as many as 11 24-hour shifts, according to Fire Department documents shown to the jury by the defense.

The jury also heard about two debilitating back injuries that Del Toro suffered on the job, including one while putting out a brush fire near the Hollywood sign, and two violent incidents to which he and his crew responded on the night of Aug. 14, 2006. Del Toro confirmed that he was particularly upset by the first incident, in which a middle-aged woman and a boy were stabbed to death in Lincoln Heights.

"He was a little boy," he said, briefly breaking down in tears and lamenting his inability to save him, partly because the hillly one-way street outside the crime scene was jammed with police cars and badly parked vehicles, making it impossible for the ambulance crew to rush the boy to hospital.

Speaking in a voice whose tone was at once soft and sometimes cocky, Del Toro told that jury that  he had worked in "busy-busy violent areas most of my career.” (The defense has been trying to show that Del Toro was severely sleep-deprived around the time that Flores was killed and that he had experienced an alcohol-fueled blackout that would have made it impossible for him to commit murder as well as have little or no recollection of what happened during those critical hours when Flores was killed.)

Today’s proceedings began with a brief testimony by an LAPD officer, Michael Oppelt, who said that Flores’ brother, Richard Flores, told him in an interview following Flores' murder that she used to hang out with gangsters who stole her money. It was only toward the of Del Toro’s testimony that Flores’ name was mentioned again.

Del Toro told the jury that he first met Flores in 2000 at the Red Lion bar in Silver Lake through another firefighter, Ralph Aragon, who was his roommate for about three years until January 2002. Aragon, who lived in Palm Springs, stayed with him occasionally and was not a close friend of his, Del Toro said.

Flores came to his house on Vincent Avenue on three occasions to visit Aragon, Del Toro said. He said he did not see Flores for about four years after Aragon moved out of his house, and he described his relationship with her as “friendly—hi and bye, that’s pretty much it.” He said he was not attracted to her romantically.

Asked by defense attorney Gutierrez what prompted him to suddenly meet Flores after a four-year gap, Del Toro replied that he was surprised to see her when “she came to my door” one afternoon in June 2006 while he was home alone and had a day off.

“I opened the door and I didn’t recognize her really—she looked so much different,” he said, adding that he talked to her as she stood on the porch of his house, separated from him by the screen door. “It was more like her asking me, ‘are you married, got a girlfriend living with you—just pleasant conversations,” Del Toro told the jury.

“I invited her in—it was a hot day—I can’t remember all the conversation,” he said, adding: “It was before July 4, I had a personal thing with my mother—we had just put her in a home [and] I had broken up with a girl I wasn’t going to see anymore.”

He said he had no plans to see Flores after she left that day but that she came by a couple of weeks later on a date he can’t recall. “She knocked on the door—or [rang] the doorbell, just unannounced,” he said, adding: “She looked like she was moving—she had a lot of stuff in her car.” The defense has already acknowledged—and the jury has heard—that Flores and Del Toro met again at his house on the night of Aug. 15, 2006, hours before Flores was found dead. Both Flores and Del Toro tested for alarmingly high levels of alcohol in their blood the following day.

Del Toro’s testimony will resume tomorrow, Thursday, at 9:30 a.m. and prosecutor Grace is expected to cross-examine him. The trial is being held at the Los Angeles Superior Court, 210 W. Temple St.