A coach is suspected of killing a 13-year-old. Did a case backlog seal the boy’s fate?
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Nearly a year before Mario Edgardo Garcia-Aquino was charged with killing a 13-year-old boy during a lewd act, Los Angeles County prosecutors were presented with the case of another teen who accused the well-known youth soccer coach of sexual abuse.
But it would take 10 months for the district attorney’s office to formally charge the 43-year-old soccer coach with sexual assault and intent to rape, and prosecutors didn’t seek a warrant to arrest Garcia-Aquino until three days before Oscar Omar Hernandez was slain and his body dumped in a roadside ditch.
In the wake of the boy’s death, some have questioned the reason for the filing delay and wondered whether earlier action would have ended Garcia-Aquino’s contact with young soccer players like Hernandez, whom friends and family called “Omar.”
“I am stunned it took so long to file these charges. They could have saved this boy’s life,” said Michael Carrillo, an attorney for the dead boy’s family. “Somebody needs to be held accountable here for keeping this man on the streets and it led to this boy’s killing. ... Someone needs to come to the family and explain how this could be allowed to happen.”
The killing of a 13-year-old boy and criminal charges against his trusted soccer coach have profoundly shaken this Latin American immigrant community in Los Angeles.
When asked for an explanation several weeks ago, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman told reporters that criminal charges “don’t happen overnight” and that the case had to be thoroughly investigated.
Now, however, it appears that the prior sex abuse allegation against Garcia-Aquino had languished in a backlog of nearly 10,000 cases that Hochman inherited from his predecessor, George Gascón, according to three law enforcement officials and an email reviewed by The Times. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
In response to questions from The Times, the district attorney’s office admitted this week that the backlog was a factor in delaying charges against Garcia-Aquino in the 2024 case. The backlog was caused by a court staffing crisis, as well as a decision by Gascón to centralize filings electronically, according to Hochman and Deputy Dist. Atty. Ryan Erlich, the president of the union that represents rank-and-file prosecutors.
Despite receiving the case from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on May 21 prosecutors “initiated” the process of filing charges on March 25— 10 months later, according to a statement from the district attorney’s office. A warrant for Garcia-Aquino’s arrest was issued April 2. Omar’s body was found that day in Ventura County.
In the statement, Hochman said his office was working to reduce the backlog.
“This administration has prioritized addressing the case backlog by revamping the filing process, training every prosecutor on the electronic filing system, and providing compensation time for prosecutors to work late and on weekends, in order to eliminate the backlog,” the statement read.
“Any unaddressed case is one too many, and this office will work diligently to address them all in as timely a manner as possible. We owe it to the victims and their families to bring them justice for the harm they have suffered.”
Gascón did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Hochman’s office, prosecutors interviewed the 16-year-old victim and “requested additional forensic testing of evidence,” but declined to offer a timeline for those actions.
Two law enforcement sources said that a prosecutor conducted a “prefiling interview” with the victim last summer and that forensic evidence reports were generated later in the year. It’s not uncommon for charges to be filed in a sex crimes case shortly after the victim is interviewed, those officials said.
A resentencing hearing that could have given the brothers a shot at parole was delayed after a fight over a parole document ordered by Gov. Gavin Newsom paralyzed proceedings.
Garcia-Aquino, a Salvadoran national whose arrest horrified the North Hollywood soccer community, was first accused of abusing a player in Sylmar in December 2022. A police investigation soon followed, but the player ultimately refused to cooperate, said Alan Hamilton, chief of detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department. The player contacted police after news of Oscar’s disappearance, Hamilton said, and Garcia-Aquino is now charged in that case.
Although Trump administration officials have seized on the defendant’s immigration status and insisted he should have been deported before allegedly carrying out the killing, the coach had no criminal record and probably would not have been a high priority for deportation.
Garcia-Aquino was ordered held without bail during a brief court hearing in downtown L.A. on Wednesday morning. He did not enter a plea in the case. Several members of Omar’s family lined the gallery.
“We have empathy for everybody impacted by the allegations relating to Mr. Aquino-Garcia,” Deputy Public Defender Janae Torrez said outside the courtroom.
While authorities have suggested there could be additional victims in the case, no other charges were added on Wednesday. Garcia-Aquino is due back in court on June 18.
Most criminal prosecutions are initiated after a law enforcement agency investigates a suspect and presents a case to the district attorney’s office. In cases where a person has been arrested, prosecutors typically have 48 hours to bring charges or must release a suspect. But in cases like Garcia-Aquino’s, where law enforcement seeks an arrest warrant, prosecutors have wide discretion about how quickly to proceed.
Concerns about a backlog reached a fever pitch during Gascón’s tenure as district attorney. In July 2023, public records show that about 10,000 criminal cases presented by law enforcement in 2021 and 2022 were still awaiting a filing decision. Among those were defendants accused of murder, domestic violence and weapons offenses.
Each year, law enforcement agencies present an average of 180,000 cases to county prosecutors for filing, records show. The number of cases “in the queue” had been reduced to roughly 8,000 as of mid-April, according to a district attorney’s office spokesman.
After Gascón’s election defeat in November, Hochman “inherited a bit of a mess” with respect to the case backlog, said Erlich, the union president.
He said the backlog was due to Gascón’s decision to centralize filings under an electronic system run out of the downtown courthouse and a growing staffing crisis within the county’s court system.
The wife of celebrity hairstylist Fabio Sementelli has been convicted of arranging his 2017 murder. Prosecutors said Monica Sementelli directed her lover to kill him.
There are about 750 deputy district attorneys left in Hochman’s ranks, Erlich said — the smallest roster the office has seen in decades. That figure does not include about 50 management-level prosecutors, including head deputies, who rarely handle trials or filing decisions, according to Erlich. With the county budget severely strained by fallout from January’s devastating wildfires and a $4-billion settlement owed to victims of rampant sex abuse in the juvenile halls, it’s unclear when, or if, the office can hire more prosecutors.
Erlich said Gascón’s decision to centralize filings was meant to help better track how many cases were “in the queue” and lead to improved resource allocation. Instead, Erlich said, the change created a situation in which the backlog was out of sight and thus out of mind.
“There’s always been a queue, a physical queue. ... You would see cases in a pile on a desk,” Erlich said. “If you walked by and you saw a couple of misdemeanors that were waiting to be filed, you grabbed them and brought them back to your desk.”
Shortly after reporters began asking questions about Garcia-Aquino’s prior crimes, leaders in the district attorney’s office began scrambling to address the backlog, according to several sources.
Hochman’s second-in-command, Chief Deputy Steve Katz, held a meeting with a number of supervisors just days after the murder charges were announced at a news conference and urged them to convince deputy district attorneys to volunteer their time to help clear the case backlog, according to three sources with knowledge of the meeting. Hochman also raised the issue in a separate meeting that week with leaders of the union that represents rank-and-file prosecutors, Erlich said.
Neither Hochman nor Katz mentioned the Garcia-Aquino case by name during those meetings, but an email reviewed by The Times, which was sent by another supervisor who attended the Katz meeting, appeared to connect the case backlog with Omar’s murder.
The author of the email said Hochman had been upset by a recent homicide and urged staff to comply with his request for volunteers to help clear the backlog, because it may have been connected to the teen’s death, according to the document.
“It’s fair to say the perception is that this murder prompted the push to clear the queue,” one prosecutor said.
After Wednesday’s court hearing, Luis Carrillo, another attorney representing the victim’s family, said Omar was the youngest of several siblings and an ascendant soccer star who was cut down by a “monster.”
The lawyer said he met with Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Thompson — the prosecutor assigned to the Garcia-Aquino case — but received no additional information about the delays in the prior cases against the soccer coach.
“If District Attorney Hochman would have acted sooner and filed the charges on the other case, we wouldn’t be here. So in my opinion, that delay led to this tragedy,” said the lawyer, who later acknowledged he was also frustrated with Gascón’s hand in the delays.
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