Pubdate: Sat, 22 Jun 2013
Source: Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
Copyright: 2013 The Oregonian
Contact:  http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/324
Author: Les Zaitz
Series: Under the curse of cartels - An Oregonian Special Report

THREE MORE HOMICIDE CASES

Law enforcement authorities believe Mexican cartels have had a hand in
many Northwest homicides. Here are three additional cases in which
cartel involvement is strongly suspected.

Grisly roadside discovery: an execution by gunfire Blood spatters
inside the Ford Expedition made clear the man slumped over the center
console was no drunken driver passed out along the road.

A motorist heading home early Jan. 27, 2012, spotted the SUV on the
shoulder of unlit Cordon Road outside Salem. He pulled over and found
the engine idling and the front doors open. He could see the man was
dead.

Rogelio Hernandez-Davalos, 25, had been executed by gunfire.

Hernandez-Davalos had attended a party that night in one of the
barnlike onion-storage sheds that dot the Lake Labish farming area
northeast of Salem, according to Marion County Sheriff's Office
detectives who reconstructed events. He left just after midnight.

At 12:23 a.m., he called a friend and asked him to buy some beer and
meet him at a Salem home. He gave no sign of distress and didn't
mention that he had a passenger.

Soon after, he pulled off the road next to a farm field. Someone,
perhaps the passenger, walked to the driver's side and shot
Hernandez-Davalos before disappearing into the night.

The motorist who found Hernandez-Davalos called 911 at 1:14 a.m.

Before police could get a warrant to search Hernandez-Davalos' rental
home just outside Salem city limits, someone entered and scoured for
potential evidence. Police still found signs of drug trafficking,
including rows of detergent bottles in the laundry room despite almost
no clothing in the house. Traffickers commonly wash heroin, tightly
packed in plastic, to cut down on its distinctive vinegar smell.

Dave White, the lead detective, found that Hernandez-Davalos had
recently married, leaving his wife in Mexico and telling her he was
going north to make money. Hernandez-Davalos was a native of the
Mexican state of Sinaloa and was in the U.S. illegally.

White and Detective Matt Wilkinson then learned through sources they
wouldn't disclose that Hernandez-Davalos had been handling enormous
amounts of heroin -- as much as 30 pounds every two weeks, enough for
27,000 undiluted doses.

They believe a Mexican cartel killed Hernandez-Davalos for stealing
from his bosses or trying to branch out on his own.

The case grew cold as potential witnesses said they wouldn't talk or
denied knowing anything. The detectives remain keen to pin down the
location of the party and who was there. They're certain someone in
that crowd knows who slid into the passenger seat next to
Hernandez-Davalos.

Shooting in Vancouver leaves 3 dead, 2 injured

Five days before Christmas in 2007, 26-year-old Jorge Pacheco invited
four friends to his sparsely furnished rental home in Vancouver in a
modest neighborhood just west of Interstate 205.

The men drank beer and played dominoes at the kitchen table,
scratching scores on a slip of paper, according to a police report.

About midnight, three other men arrived. They were invited in and
offered beers before they pulled guns and marched Pacheco and his
friends to a rear bedroom.

They ordered all five to lie facedown on the floor, then shot each in
the back of the head.

Pacheco died on the spot, and two others died at a hospital. Two
survived grazing wounds, one leaving a bloody handprint near the front
door as he staggered outside, according to police files.

The killers, one dropping a pistol in the street out front, jumped
into a van with a waiting driver.

Veteran Detective Wally Stefan of the Vancouver Police Department then
pieced together a disturbing case.

Stefan quickly suspected the men were killed over drug money. When he
died, Pacheco was the target of drug investigations in Oregon and
California. He once told a police informant that he led a network that
distributed meth, heroin and marijuana in those states and Washington.
Police in San Mateo, Calif., pegged him as a major heroin supplier
with connections reaching to Chicago.

An FBI-led task force in Portland tracked him through wiretaps and
surveillance, including a transmitter they placed on his black BMW.
They identified him as the supplier for organizations in Beaverton and
Clackamas before losing track of him when the transmitter's battery
died.

The survivors and getaway driver, who was caught, wouldn't say much.
But Stefan learned the killers may have been dispatched by California
traffickers affiliated with Mexican cartels.

Detectives ultimately identified Benjamin Vasquez-Salamanca, a
27-year-old fugitive wanted on Oregon drug charges, as the leader of
the execution team.

Clark County prosecutors indicted Vasquez-Salamanca. Leland Rakoz, a
deputy U.S. marshal in Vancouver and a renowned tracker of wanted men,
set out to find him, questioning friends and relatives in several
states. He kept getting the same story: After the Vancouver hit,
Vasquez-Salamanca was killed in Mexico by the Los Zetas cartel.

The story makes sense, Rakoz said. Vasquez-Salamanca, who stayed in
touch with his family even when on the run, had gone silent. Rakoz
could find no trace of him.

The other two killers returned to Mexico, according to police
reports.

Stefan and Rakoz are keeping their files open.

2002 killing on I-5 linked to drug trafficking

Why would anyone kill 53-year-old Angel Carlon Silva? The death
remained a mystery for more than a decade.

Now The Oregonian has learned the killing was probably tied to drug
trafficking.

To all appearances, Silva was just another motorist as he drove his
gold Lincoln sedan south on Interstate 5 about 11 a.m. on Dec. 15,
2002. His 18-year-old grandson was in the front seat, an acquaintance
in the back.

Along a rural stretch north of Myrtle Creek, a green Mercury Tracer
with three men suddenly pulled up in the fast lane, along the
Lincoln's left side. The passenger window went down, a gun came out,
and a hail of bullets blasted the Lincoln.

Silva was hit. The grandson guided the car to a stop on the shoulder,
where Silva died behind the wheel.

The men in the Tracer sped to a gas station 10 miles down the road,
where they ducked into the restroom to change clothes. The men
abandoned the Tracer, which had been stolen in California, and hopped
into a waiting Ford Expedition.

Oregon State Police Lt. Darin Lux, then a detective on his first
homicide, said the crime appeared planned. Witnesses were reluctant to
talk, but within days, investigators issued warrants for two suspects:
Sergio Villafana-Ortega, then 23, and Gerardo Botello Rosales, then
25.

State police had cited Villafana-Ortega for speeding six months before
the shooting, court records show. He listed a Salem address one block
from a house that a federal affidavit in another case said was used by
a major drug ring.

Lux said the motive for Silva's death was never clear, only that
investigators learned it may have involved some sort of retaliation.
The two suspects were never found.

But a former drug trafficker told The Oregonian recently that Silva
was the godfather of a child of Jorge Ortiz Oliva, a Salem drug
kingpin. Ortiz Oliva, later convicted, had connections to a cartel in
Nocupetaro, Mexico, according to court records.

The former trafficker, who asked that his identity be shielded to
protect his safety, said he drove a load of marijuana from California
to Salem the day before the killing. He thinks Silva may have been
returning to California with the cash to pay.

The former trafficker said he and Ortiz Oliva attended Silva's funeral
in California. A Roseburg funeral home confirmed that Silva's body was
shipped to a now-defunct mortuary in Tulare, Calif.

After the funeral, the former trafficker wondered aloud why the
suspects hadn't been arrested.

As he recalled, Ortiz Oliva responded: "They've been taken care of."
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