Justice For Anthony Vargas
Pictures by Ashley Balderrama
Story by Laura Peterson
Pictured above is Anthony’s Mother, Grandmother, and Father.
Anthony Vargas was just 21 years old when he was murdered by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department on August 21, 2018. Lisa Vargas, Anthony’s mother, recalls what happened that day. “Anthony was usually a homebody. He was either at home with the family or at the church he worked at. The night he was murdered, a friend had asked him to help lead a healing circle at a BBQ. It was getting late and Anthony still wasn’t home when I received a call from someone asking if I had heard from Anthony, or if anyone had.” She said the caller told her something had happened at the BBQ and that someone who fit his description was lying on the floor. Lisa immediately got off the phone and tried to call Anthony and everyone in her family to see if anyone had heard from him. Nobody had.
Lisa rushed to the location where the body was reported to meet her daughter and son-in-law who were already there. The entire area was completely blocked off. The Vargas family asked the sheriff if they could see the person on the ground who they feared might be Anthony. They said no. The family showed the officer a picture of Anthony and the sheriff told them to go to the station for any information. This was at 2:10AM.
The Vargas family went to the sheriff’s station as instructed. While there, the sheriffs told them that at 2:22AM the person in question had passed away and the paramedics were at the site, but no one from the family saw any paramedics when they were on site at 2:10AM. Lisa was furious. “We were 300 feet away from my son at 2:10 when he was still alive. What kills me the most is thinking about the last moments of his life. I have so many questions. Was he alone? Was he in pain? What were his last words? Was he scared? Was he calling out for me? We could have been there with him.”
Despite the sheriffs telling the Vargas to go home, they wouldn’t leave the crime scene. They stayed for 13 hours to try to identify Anthony, searching for anything that might indicate it was him, but the numerous sheriffs at the scene wouldn’t allow them to access the scene or identify the body.
From left to right, pictured above is Val Vargas (Aunt of Anthony), Adrian Aguilar (Cousin of Anthony), Stephanie Luna (Aunt of Anthony), and Aurora Aguilar (Cousin of Anthony)
While the family was waiting, one of the officers, Officer Cruz, verbally harassed Anthony’s twin brother looking him up and down and asking him ‘what are you?” Followed by calling him “an animal”. At around 1PM the following day, the sheriffs let them come a little closer but they still couldn’t see anything except that from a distance the victim appeared tall, like Anthony. It was one of the hottest summers that year, that day was around 90-100 degrees and they could see the body swelling up. They only put up tarps about 20 minutes before the coroner arrived. Before the tarps went up, a community member went to the roof of the building to take a picture of the scene from above. Despite the picture being blurry and the body bloated, Lisa knew in her gut that it was her son.
Finally, the coroners arrived at 3PM. They told Lisa that they would let her identify her son’s body but needed some time. Ten minutes later, they allowed Lisa and her son to approach Anthony’s body, now covered up. An officer opened the cover only slightly, showing the family nothing but the right side of Anthony’s lip to the top of his eyebrow. The officer was holding the bag so Lisa couldn’t see anything but that small portion of Anthony’s face.
Two weeks later, Anthony’s body was released from the morgue for the viewing. Lisa, Yolanda (Anthony’s grandma) and Stephanie (Anthony’s aunt) brought clothes he liked to wear, t-shirts and basketball shorts. The mortuary informed the family that for the viewing he needed a long sleeve shirt, a hat and gloves, an odd request which the family complied with even though they didn’t understand at the time. When they finally saw Anthony, he looked completely different. It didn’t look like Anthony. The family thought it was perhaps a bad makeup job. Lisa took a picture of Anthony at the viewing because she wasn’t ready to let him go and say goodbye to her baby. She looked at his picture over and over again, eventually noticing that his lip had been stitched up. Through the family’s own investigation, they learned that a bullet had exited through his mouth.
Anthony’s Urn that rests in the families living room.
After this discovery it became clear that when Lisa and her son first identified Anthony’s body the officer holding the body bag was attempting to conceal the bullet wounds inflicted on his head and body, and that the odd clothing requests most likely served the same purpose.
For a whole year, the only answer from the Sheriffs to the Vargas family was that the case was under investigation and they could not give any further information. That is when they began to investigate on their own. A woman that worked at the mortuary recognized the Vargas family, and Anthony in particular, from when they buried their great grandmother there. When she learned the Vargas family didn’t know anything about the case, she pulled them aside and disclose to them that Anthony had been shot 13 times.
For a whole year, they didn’t know what happened, where he was shot, how many officers were involved, or who the officers were. When the autopsy was released there were glaring inconsistencies with reports given prior which said that there was an officer in the front and back and that Anthony had a gun that he tried to pull out three times. The autopsy report showed that Anthony had been punched in the head multiple times by the officers, and then shot 13 times from the back (2 shots in his head and 1 shot in his forearm).
“Anyone with their back facing you is not a threat. These officers have training. We do not. Their story kept changing and we just had to do our own research,” Lisa said. The Vargas family believes a gag order was placed on them by the LASD as they were starting to discover more inconsistencies in the case through their own research and investigations.
The family of Anthony Vargas stands on the stairs of their home which features pictures, paintings, and memories of Anthony.
The two deputies who murdered Anthony Vargas were Jonathan Rojas and Nikolis Perez. They claimed Anthony was a suspect in a robbery, that they later exonerated him from. According to Elizabeth Kim of @lacopwatch, it is likely that Rojas and Perez are members of the Banditos, one of the police gangs in Los Angeles. The Banditos have de facto control over East LA and members have a common tattoo on one leg of a skeleton with a mustache wearing a sombrero and holding a pistol. Details in Rojas and Perez’ reports of Anthony’s death mirror details of several other cases surrounding the Banditos, for example, the existence of a “ghost gun,” where a gun is planted to justify the murder by falsifying evidence.
Kim says LASD officers have been known to target and harass grieving families who file law suits against the Department. Since the murder of Anthony, members of the LASD continue to harass the Vargas family. Without cause or justification, deputies have driven to Vargas family members’ homes and sat in their cars outside their driveways. Even one officer came to Lisa’s office and called her a “media queen.”
Pictured above is Lisa Vargas (mother of Anthony), and Yolanda Aguilar (grandmother of Anthony).
“Anthony was a loving giant. He was fun and loving. He made sure everyone else was ok before himself. He worked in a church and led bible study. He is not at all who the media or the police made him out to be.Anthony was such a big bear that we used to wrestle. I remember one day Anthony was laying on the couch. I was in one of my moods but he was picking on me and trying to make me laugh. I got so angry with him that I went and threw myself on top of him but we actually BROKE THE COUCH. We were wrestling on top of the couch and we ended up falling. But nobody was able to help us up. We were laying there trying to get up but we couldn’t get up. My sisters are very tiny and they were trying to help us get up but they couldn’t. We were laying there for five minutes laughing. There are so many memories with him but when they pass, the ones that you think are the least memorable are the ones that are. That was my favorite moment with him.”
“One time he brought me a rocking chair from church because one of the brothers from church owned a second hand store. So he went and got it for my with the truck. Well one day he sat down on it and, oooh it just fell to the floor broken. Every time I went to church the brother would ask me, ‘So how’s your rocking chair?’ I didn’t know how to tell him it broke. Anthony would always sit in the back of the church and I would look down at Anthony giving him the look like I’m not going to tell the brother you broke the chair when you sat in it. So one day, he tells the brother ‘I broke grandma’s rocking chair.’ The brother took it in to try to fix it but it couldn’t be put back together.”
Pictured above is Yolanda Aguilar (Grandmother of Anthony Vargas).
Pictured above is Val Vargas (Aunt of Anthony Vargas)
“Whenever Anthony went shopping, he would always put the costumes on right in the aisles. No matter what it was, even if it was just a hat. He would put on something. So one time, we went shopping and he put on this hot dog costume and he got stuck in it. He couldn’t get the costume off so we had to pull it off of him. IT RIPPED! It might have ripped actually. Hypothetically, it might have already been ripped before. We don’t know. But you know, one size doesn’t always fit all.”
“My sister lives upstairs from my mom. One year Anthony went to her house to make tamales and pozole. My sister is a really good cook while Anthony is a really good BBQer. So he made this pan of pozole. It looked really good but it did NOT taste good. None of us had it in us to tell him that it wasn’t the best pozole but we all ate it. But BBQing, Anthony could cook RIBS. That boy was a rib cooker, a chili maker, a rice cooker. When it came to chicken, that wasn’t his thing. One year he made chicken and that chicken was so burnt on the outside and pink on the inside. He tried to serve us that chicken on a plate and we were all like, ‘No! We are not eating this!’.There are too many memories to put into words. Anthony made up the holidays. Anything you can think of that involved the kids he would do. He would be out here playing basketball. He slammed me into the gate one year playing basketball. I sprained my ankle. He was everywhere all the time and such a dominate person in the house. He was so involved with everyone. He would support everyone.”
Pictured above is Stephanie Luna (Aunt of Anthony Vargas)
Pictured above is Aurora Aguilar (Cousin of Anthony Vargas), and Daisy (Anthony’s Cat)
“He was my best friend. He was the type of person everyone would want to be around. He had a big heart for everyone. We would hang out and have a good time. He used to be like the big person with the heart in the family. Everyone used to want to have fun with him. He would laugh and smile and never be sad. He would just have a good time with everyone. I’m sad that he’s gone because I can’t see him smile and laugh with us. I remember one time we were upstairs and Anthony was coming home from something. And he always tossed on his bed. He did a twirl and he broke the legs from under his bed. And then I said “You broke your bed.” He said “Again, like always, I know.” So then his bed was broken all the time and we just left it there.We shared a room. I used to see him across the bed relaxing and now I see no one. I don’t know why he’s gone because he didn’t do anything wrong. I miss him.”
“One time he was in church and he got up from the chair too fast. He got a cramp in his leg because he moved too fast. In his motion, everyone thought he was dancing in the spirit. And he had to play it off the whole time and the rest of church that he was dancing in the spirit”
Pictured above is Adrian Aguilar (Cousin of Anthony Vargas)
The Vargas family has asked us to continue to share Anthony’s story. They want to expose these officers and get them off the streets. To support them in their fight for justice. Please follow @justiceforanthonyvargas on Instagram
*This was brought to you by the @publicstatementapparel x @saytheirnamesLA mask campaign. A significant portion of the every mask’s sale will go to a fund for the families. Please get your mask today at publicstatementapparel.com*
Sed diam nonummy euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.