After Avila punched him in the face, Romo shot the 19-year-old in front of a crowd of diners, The Times reported. Romo was 18 when he got in a fight with another teenager, Manuel Avila, at a Tommy’s hamburger stand on Roscoe Boulevard. As a teenager, he supported his grandparents by working for his uncles, who owned a construction business and machine shop. Romo, whose parents divorced when he was 4, was raised mostly by his paternal grandparents in San Fernando, according to court documents. Unlike his three younger co-defendants, who seemed by turns bored and mildly amused by the proceedings, Romo watched the testimony intently, taking notes on a legal pad and whispering often in his lawyer’s ear. The collars of his dress shirts could not entirely hide the hummingbird and butterfly tattooed on either side of his neck. “All I ask for is complete control of Panorama City,” he wrote in 2017 in a WhatsApp message from prison to an underling on the streets.įive feet 11 and well-built, Romo wore glasses and a rumpled charcoal suit in the courtroom. This was Romo’s domain: the street, the gang, the money to be wrung from the pushers and dispensaries and gambling parlors that operated within the gang’s territory. The night air crackled with the anticipation that gunfire might erupt from any oncoming car. If a carload of rivals from gangs such as Columbus Street or Barrio Van Nuys pulled up, members of Blythe Street vanished into the warren of hallways and stairwells. They’d lock themselves inside the laundry rooms to smoke methamphetamine, squat in vacant apartments, sell drugs in the parking lots. On any night you’d catch them hanging out in apartment complexes with names such as the Casitas, the Pinks and Green Village. So you’re robbing people, jacking cars, selling drugs.” They’d spend their days finding “ways to survive,” the gang member said. Some were 12 or 13 when they joined, their parents absent or uninterested in their lives. Thank you for your support.Įxplore more Subscriber Exclusive content. Times subscribers special access to our best journalism. Subscribers get exclusive access to this story When the lieutenant, who dutifully orchestrated that murder and several more, got strung out and stopped returning Romo’s calls, it was his turn to go. Get an unsanctioned tattoo? “Take care of it,” Romo told his lieutenant. Testimony and Romo’s text messages created the portrait of a micromanager who knew just one response to petty slights and suspicions. Anyone who didn’t go along, prosecutors said, was eliminated. He put members of his gang to work selling the Mexican Mafia’s drugs, collecting their debts and eliminating their enemies. Romo used Blythe Street to raise his own standing within the Mexican Mafia, the prison-based syndicate whose ranks he hoped to join, witnesses testified. Prosecutors said the 45-year-old made good on that promise: On Romo’s orders, members of his gang, Blythe Street, turned on and killed one another in a string of murders that left eight dead, according to evidence presented at a months-long trial that began in March in Los Angeles Superior Court. He would rid the neighborhood of rivals, of informants, of drug addicts and the do-nothings he considered dead weight. He was going to “clean out house,” Romo told another veteran of his gang. When he returned to Panorama City 18 years later, he didn’t like what he saw.
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