How the RPD Cracked the Most Heinous Crime in the City’s History

publication date: Jul 31, 2008

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author/source: John Fredericks / STAFF

By John Fredericks / STAFF

Azteca Restaurant is open for business today, but six months ago it was the scene of one of Roswell’s most grisly crimes.

In an era of widespread mistrust between different government law enforcement agencies, last week’s arrest of three suspects in the tragic murder of Roswell’s Lydia Alvarado is a crime story of amazing cross-jurisdictional cooperation and true gumshoe detective work by the Roswell Police Department. Like the Royal Canadian Mounties, they got their men, and they did it the old fashioned way: inexhaustible tenacity, hard work, pure gut instinct and a few breaks along the way.

To get an idea of how concerted an effort it was to track down Alvarado’s suspected killers, one must only look at the list of who was involved in the capture of the three suspects now in custody: Roswell Police, Dekalb County Sheriff, Sandy Springs Police, Atlanta SWAT, the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), National Security Administration (NSA), Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), United States Postal Service (USPS), Homeland Security, FBI and a Federal Marshal.

One Roswell police officer estimated that, “On any given day at any given time, we had half our force involved in this case. Our focus was intense.”

The fact that Alvarado was such a vital part of the local Hispanic community and a well-known and well-respected citizen in Roswell served to magnify the intensity of the police department’s efforts.

“Most of the officers that have been here for a while knew Lydia as a teenager. So it became personal," said Lieutenant James McGee, spokesperson for the RPD.

Fulton D.A. Weighs In
“I wish that everybody in the county handled murder cases the way that they handled this case,” said Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, whose office will be prosecuting the cases against the three suspects. “Those guys have worked tirelessly to get this thing solved. It is one of the best examples of police work that I have ever been associated with. That community should be really happy that those guys are working for them.”

The arrest of these three murder suspects in the brutal and senseless killing of Alvarado came almost six months to the day after she was murdered and is just the beginning of the end of one of the darkest chapters in Roswell’s history.

The Crime
On Saturday, January 28, three men entered Alvarado’s store, Azteca, located on Alpharetta Highway (Highway 9) just south of Holcomb Bride Road, shortly after 9 p.m. with guns waving. Dressed in black, donning black ski masks, and wearing dark glasses, they began to rob the store. Then one of them gunned down Alvarez in cold blood, shooting her in the heart as she backed up, defenseless, toward the cash cage. They got away with less than $30,000. The entire thing was caught on videotape with the store’s security camera.

The crime was as frightening as is it was brazen, and the murder rocked Roswell.

Now, all three men who were suspected in the murder are in jail.

They are David Alfonso Perez-Luna, 31, of Riverdale; Samuel Armondo Boyce, 30, of Douglasville; and Joel Augusto Boyce Douglas, 25, of Atlanta.

Luna and Boyce are originally from Panama.

How did the Roswell cops get these guys?
Our account of the details of how the suspects were arrested came from a variety of sources inside these law enforcement agencies that were willing to share this information with us anonymously. They are not authorized to speak to the press on behalf of their respective agencies.

Roswell detective Chris Quinn was the lead detective on the case. Sgt. Cam Roe and Lt. Ed Sweeney were the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers on the case.

School Of Hard Knocks
The RPD tossed out as wide a blanket as possible when they began their search for suspects in the case. From that broad search they slowly began to narrow down the possibilities.

“We knocked on a hundred doors, followed up on a thousand leads, talked to several hundred people and looked at 30,000 phone records,” said one veteran Roswell detective. “Its not like what you see on T.V. There was no silver bullet, no one big clue. This was just a relentless and tireless effort on our part to get these [guys].”

The inside of Azteca, where Alvarado was shot

One officer involved in the gathering of forensic evidence said, “We interviewed everyone that called. Every nugget of evidence is a piece to the puzzle. Every piece of evidence had to be categorized, cross-referenced, time-lined, and coordinated. This was a complex organization of evidence. We had some leads and we had some gut instincts. We have guys here who know what they are doing, they’re pros. We’d look at a video, or a piece of evidence several times, separately, then get back together and talk about it, review it. Sometimes different people see different things.”

Video Provides Information
A big portion of the search focused on the recovered videotape from the Azteca security camera.

After GBI processed the crime scene, the video was all the RPD had to go on. The camera caught everything that happened that night until one of the suspects spray-painted the lens, but that was not until after the shooting.
Why spray paint the cameras after the robbery and murder and not before?

“One guy just screwed up,” one officer theorized. “These guys aren’t exactly rocket scientists.”

RPD scrutinized the video for weeks, frame by frame.

The video shows one patron was shopping and another eating at the counter when the robbery began.

When the assailants entered the store, Alvarado yelled in Spanish for her clerk to push the alarm button, which was behind the counter. Her clerk panicked, said she didn’t understand her and she froze. She never pushed the alarm.

The video shows Alvarado then walking carefully back to the cage where the store’s safe was held, which is perpendicular to the counter, and making a 90 degree turn, where she was cornered and came face to face with the gunman. Inexplicably and without warning the shooter raised his gun and fired into her chest at point blank range. She died almost instantly.

“The gunman may have thought she was going for the alarm or for a firearm. She was known to have weapons there,” stated one Roswell investigator.

Meanwhile, one suspect stood guard at the door, while the other tied up the clerk and two patrons then spray-painted the cameras.

Clues: The Dropped Sunglasses
The first solid piece of evidence in the search came in the form of a pair of white sunglasses, dropped by one of the suspects on or near the crime scene during the getaway.

The sunglasses were dark, and during the getaway one of the suspects raised his glasses over his head to see better. In the confusion of the getaway, as he raced out, the glasses dropped off his head. It was a fortuitous turn, as police were able to extract touch DNA from them.

The Motive 
Although it doesn’t explain the shooting, the story behind the robbery began to unfold when police found out through one of their tips that a regular customer of the store, a Mexican who had cashed checks there for some time, had contacted one of the three assailants and told them Azteca would be an easy hit. He apparently told the prospective robbers that the store typically carried over $100,000 cash on any Saturday night before closing.

Alvarado kept the cash in the store to send wire transfers or cash payroll checks, and other than a couple of safes and the cash cage there was little security in place. Although Alvarado was thought to have a firearm in the back, the belief among the plotters was that she would not use it.

“It was sold as a low risk, easy six figure job in one of Atlanta’s northern suburbs where the cops aren’t trained in this sort of thing,” opined one official.

From there the misinformed speculation began to flow among the plotters about how big a take was available in a potential robbery. That misinformation, police believe, may have had a direct impact on the fatal twist that the night took.

“He said there would be over $100,000 in cash,” the investigator said. “But it turned out there was only about $25,000. The big safe they thought was holding the $100,000 was no longer used. Alvarado had lost the combination four months before. The safe they used was under the counter, smaller, and bolted to the floor. They only got the money in the cash bags. This was a robbery gone terribly bad from the get-go,” offered one of the investigators.

The Phone Call
Of all things, a flat tire led to a key tip that came in the form of a phone call made from a pre-paid cell phone. One witness came forward and said while he was at Smith Tire, right next door to Azteca, waiting for a flat tire to get fixed on a late January afternoon, he noticed someone walking around the store, seemingly casing it. The informant said he didn’t think much of it at the time.

He said he noticed it only because he thought he knew the man who was snooping around, but he couldn’t place him. He noticed that after walking around the store a few times, the suspect waited to catch a MARTA bus at the stop on the same corner of Alpharetta Highway. While waiting for the bus, the witness said he saw the suspect make a number of cell phone calls.

The police then got a court order to trace all the cell phone calls made in the two hour period that the suspect was seen making before getting on the MARTA bus that day in January. Because he used a pre-paid cell phone, RPD needed to get all the calls that pinged off the closest cell tower, but that information is only accessible through technology that NASA developed and subsequently sold to the National Security Agency (NSA).

Roswell officials got a warrant for the calls, and asked the NSA to give them the data dump. There was a princely fee for the service, but Roswell Police Chief Ed Williams approved the funds and got the information.

The RPD got data on nearly 32,000 cell phone calls made off that tower from the NSA in the two-hour period in question. They started sorting through them, one by one.

“It took a couple of months to get through all of them,” one officer commented. 

Unrelated Arrest
Perhaps the biggest break for the RPD came in the form of a shooting and an unrelated arrest in Clayton County.

Suspects Samuel Boyce and Luna apparently did similar robberies in Clayton County and Forest Park, police said.

A third suspect, Darren Baptiste, joined those two for a couple of jobs, but he was not involved in the Roswell job, police said. 

According to reports, after a botched robbery in Forest Park, Boyce, upset over the money split, shot Baptiste during an argument but did not kill him. Baptiste had to go to the emergency room, where he was treated for his gunshot wounds and subsequently interrogated by Clayton County authorities.

During the interrogation Baptiste admitted he was involved in some of the Mexican check cashing store crimes that were taking place, and said he knew of one in Roswell where he thought Boyce might have been involved, police said.

Clayton County police notified Roswell and they began looking for Boyce. Clayton County arrested him for an unrelated crime with a SWAT Team at 2 a.m. without incident. He has since been charged with murder by the Roswell police department.

During their questioning of Boyce, the Roswell job came up again. Clayton County officials had seized Boyce’s cell phone and turned it over to RPD. Roswell’s crime lab did a match of the cell phone calls made by Boyce against the 32,000 in the NSA database for the time period in question. Luna’s cell number popped up. This made Luna the prime suspect as the man at the Roswell bus stop on Highway 9 at the time the of the Smith Tire sighting.

Here is the take of one metro area detective:

“Boyce knew Luna, had his cell number in his cell phone, and it matched the tower calls. Then the Roswell cops tracked Luna to where he once worked and got his application for employment.”

The circle was completed when the witness at Smith Tire got back in touch with Roswell police and said he finally remembered the man he had seen from working with him on a few jobs.

He told Roswell police he worked with him at a painting-landscaping job a few times. Police went to the apparent work place and investigated. They used warrants to pull several applications, one of which had all the information for one David Luna.

Once things began to unravel, Boyce started to sing.

A Clayton County official said Boyce told investigators, “Look, get everyone together, give me a deal, and I will verify the facts.”

It was a familiar turn of events for officers who have cornered suspects before.

“Once their ship starts sinking, these [guys] rat each other out like the garbage they are,” said one officer.

Tracking David Luna
Roswell cops, now armed with a name, an address and warrant, started to track Luna. It wasn’t an easy task and the chase took several twists and turns before Luna was eventually arrested.

Multiple visits to his known hangouts proved futile. Other people would come and go, but not Luna. The Roswell police had a 24-hour under cover surveillance near his last known address and his known hangouts.

“We were undercover and we used all sorts of vehicles to track him. We used a Pizza Hut delivery car, a UPS truck, a plumbing truck and a cable truck. Those cable trucks can stay parked for hours without suspicion – they take so long. Some of us were getting a few hours sleep a night tailing his whereabouts,” said one Roswell official familiar with the case.

The Bimbo Factor
Unsuccessful in finding Luna and fearful he would feel the heat and flee or go underground, the cops put the watch on for all planes going to Panama and South America.

Sandy Springs cops found out who his girlfriend was. RPD tracked her but, still, Luna didn’t show. They then put the pinch on his girlfriend, who they referred to as a “bimbo,” to give him up. When first approached, she refused, and told detectives she did not know where Luna was.

Roswell cops didn’t believe her.

They tracked her to a Starbucks where she got a packet of sugar to put in her coffee. An undercover cop got the opened pouch out of the trash for her fingerprints and DNA. Then the RPD went to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE checked her prints and learned she was here illegally.

ICE enforcers then went to her apartment and told her she had 24 hours to give up Luna or she and her children could have immigration problems. She relented and gave ICE an address for Luna. ICE officials contacted the RPD and the chase was on.

“ICE stepped on the bimbo with spiked golf shoes,” said one investigator. But still Luna was elusive.

A Bold Move By Immigration
RPD then got a federal warrant for the USPS to “cover” his mail, which means that postal authorities can’t open the mail but they can scan the front of the envelope and forward it to the cops.

One day Luna got a letter from Immigration saying his visa was expiring.

Roswell authorities then went to the INS and asked them to tell Luna when he called to let him choose a date and time to come in and get the visa renewal paperwork done. RPD thought if he chose the time, he would feel more comfortable and would be more inclined to show up.

Luna eventually called and scheduled his meeting for Thursday, July 24 at 9:15 a.m. at the Federal Immigration building on Lavista Road in Dekalb County.

“This was an actual immigration issue. He came in to do his business. He came in with his notebook. He had no clue what was in store for him, like life in prison,” said a cop.

When his paperwork was done, INS officials asked him to wait for one more minute. He was on the third story of a federal office building and was unarmed, as he went through security on his way in. Three Dekalb County officers entered the room and arrested him, and they took him downstairs and handed him over to Roswell Police.

One Roswell detective on the scene described the arrest this way. “We said, ‘Hey pal, we have a warrant for your arrest, and one of the charges is murder.’ He peed his pants right there. He turned white, like a deer in headlights. ‘Welcome back to Roswell,’ we told him.”

“We interrogated him until he lawyered up. Once he did that, we can’t ask questions, but we can tell him things. So we told him one of his two cohorts was captured, but not who it was. We said, ‘Want a pizza? Oh, by the way, the first one who helps us gets the deal – and the other two get fried. Want anchovies on that pizza? Here is my card, I take collect calls from the Fulton County jail.’”

“They’re like rats jumping off a sinking ship,” one detective said.

Six hours later, Luna was on his way to Fulton County jail.

The Final Bust
Joel Douglas, the third suspect, sat in the back of a Roswell patrol car Sunday afternoon after he finally surrendered following a standoff with Roswell police. Investigators at RPD said he had been holed up inside a home on Shell Drive in southwest Atlanta.

He may have been the one who pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Lydia Alvarado.

“We surrounded the place, listened with the help of the Fulton County SWAT team, and after about an hour standoff, the subject did surrender without incident,” said Lt. McGee.

Investigators said Douglas' arrest meant they got all three of the suspects in Alvarado's death.

McGee said the last suspect was arrested, “six months to the day, almost. It was the 26th of January” when Alvarado was shot.

What Lies Ahead
The suspects will be indicted and, if evidence is sufficient, formally charged with murder, false imprisonment, armed robbery and aggravated assault in association with the Alvarado case. After the indictment a Fulton County judge will be chosen for the case and a prosecutor from the D.A.’s office will be assigned. The suspects will be arraigned and enter a plea and then the trial process will begin.

Because of the machinations of that process, Fulton D.A. Paul Howard said that it will be six months at the least – and more likely a year or more – before the three men stand before a jury of their peers.

Once that happens, prosecutors will likely seek the death penalty for the man who pulled the trigger on Alvarado.

Williams

“It’s on the table because of the brutality of the incident,” Howard said. “It was so unnecessary for this to have to have taken place. So we certainly will look at it, but we know we’ve got some challenges already.”

Chief among those challenges is how to nail down who actually pulled the trigger. In cases where there are multiple suspects, it often becomes a he-said, he-said situation where two of the suspects point the finger at the other one and often change their stories to avoid the truth.

“That’s what really makes it difficult in these multi-defendant robbery cases because what happens is one or two of the defendants will start talking,” Howard said. “But they always want to tell on the other partner and not on themselves. But we are reviewing it and we’ll see what happens.”

Whatever happens, justice awaits the three suspects, putting a light at the end of a dark tunnel of events that began with that fateful night at El Azteca. And according to an investigator involved in the case, the fact that those three men will face justice serves notice to anyone else plotting violent crime in Roswell.

“Exits 7A and 7B are just not where you want to get off to commit a crime,” he said.