Ramon Escobar - Documentary

0:00In America, some of the world's most depraved criminals are locked behind bars. One of these violent mates is serial killer Ramon Eskobar. He had this look in his eye. It scared you. Eskobar violently murdered two members of his family. Eskobar uses a police baton and bashes his uncle over the head repeatedly until he dies. The way that he kills his aunt is extremely personal, looking into her eyes as she's taking her last breath. Eskobar's lust for killing moved on to the streets when he murdered complete strangers. Eskobar come up behind these three men while they're sleeping. He hits them over the head with a baseball bat. This is a violent predator walking around praying on innocent people.

1:00He came and attacked me. You're not expecting the devil to come around the corner. He's killed seven people in less than a month and he's injured or seriously injured seven others. Even behind bars, Eskobar continues to be a threat. He strangled his cellmate to death with his bare hands. Eskobar to me is someone who enjoys not just killing, but slaughtering that's who he is. North current state prison in California is what we call a reception center.

2:02So when inmates get into the system, they will go there and they will be classified to which prison they would eventually end up at. The prison can house up to 3,000 inmates. The inmates are either coming from the streets or county jail. We have to go through their police report, the previous criminal sentences. To find out who they are, quickly identifying the inmates' danger factor is vital. They get assigned a point level. If they do have an in-cell murder, meaning that an enemy has killed another within the cell, a letter will be affixed to their file, showing that they cannot have a cellmate because they present a danger. In North Kern, one inmate made their threat bubble very clear, a serial killer, Ramon Eskobar.

3:02This is a man who was seemingly prone to violence with little provocation. Therefore, just talking about danger and savagery, those two words are probably synonymous with Ramon Eskobar. The prison system is where you supposed to know your lesson. There is no rehabilitation for a person like that. There is just not. There's no hope. He is the embodiment of the devil. My name is James Quilly. I'm a criminal justice reporter for the Los Angeles Times and I covered the serial killings of often Ramon Eskobar. Ramon Eskobar was born in El Salvador in the 1970s. He was born and grew up during the brutal civil war between the government and left-wing guerrilla groups there. This led to a lot of violence in the streets.

4:04Eskobar's mother was killed during his conflict and I believe in explosion. He was one of many people fleeing from that region at that time for him. Eskobar was in his early teen years. At that point, he illegally migrated into the United States, Texas, where he was taken in by his aunt Dina. Eskobar had a tragic early upbringing due to the war and due to the loss of his mother. It's an abrupt rupture in the caretaking that he had. That's got to be extremely traumatizing and it's going to change the trajectory of a child's life. Luckily, he's taken in by his aunt. Ramon Eskobar treated him as if he were her own child, raising him along her own children as if they were siblings.

5:12My name is Oswaldo Salamaka. I am the son of Dina Eskobar. And I don't like to say it like this, but cousins of Ramon Eskobar. As Waldo's family had also fled war torn El Salvador, making Houston, Texas their home. My family had to restart all over. My mother, I know she was a very well-educated woman, she was a registered nurse in El Salvador. She went to church, she prayed for everybody. My mother was one of the greatest persons that ever walked this earth to me. A lot of people knew her, my mom had not one backbone in her body. My mother-in-law, she was a ball of positivity, that's all I could say.

6:13You could be having the worst day and she found some type of form to bring that reassurance shining to your life. She was just a wonderful person. As Waldo was three years old, when his teenage cousin Ramon came to live with him and his siblings. I always shared a room with him. I was young, I remember growing up side by side with him like a brother. My mom made sure that we always treated him like a brother. My mother loved him and she loved him as her own son, where it's as happy as your regular family. Though as we became an older teenager, Ramon started acting up at home. There were times where something was said a month, he always was just a little bit that much more aggressive.

7:13In 1988, Ramon had his first run-in with the law when he was about 17 and as a result of that, he was transported back to his country in El Salvador. I don't remember the case, I was young. I know it would happen to be like a domestic altercation with the next that he had. So he got deported after that. It's interesting because he came from such horrific circumstances to much better circumstances in the United States, but yet it seems that wasn't enough for him. Is it that he was already predisposed as somebody who was going to commit a life of crime, go against authority, no matter what kind of nurturing environment he had? After Escobar returned a few years later to the United States, he was arrested again, ultimately sentenced to five years for burglary where he served some time in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

8:17After spending two years in prison in Texas, Escobar was deported again back to El Salvador in 1997. But he kept trying to come back. Between 1997 and around 2011, he was arrested and convicted six different times of burglary and illegal injury. Escobar was deported multiple times by immigrations and customs enforcement. Sometimes it was simply for being illegal alien, sometimes it was due to arrests and convictions on other crimes, mostly in Texas. When he was forced to live back in El Salvador, the family did their best to support him. My mom always helping her, and she was always sending the money. Even me, we will put money on his book's commissary all the time because we're family.

9:18This idea being constantly reinforced that you're not wanted here in the US could have been something that Escobar internalized, but he wasn't being accepted by society because he was engaging in criminal activity. So you would think that he would say to himself, this is not working for me. The more I engage in criminal activity, the more I get deported back to a place that I don't want to be. But that didn't stop him. So to me, that further pains the picture that he really had no regard for authority, no regard for the law. When Escobar managed to get back to the US illegally, he would stay with us Waldo and his aunt Dina while they started the appeal process for him to remain. But his behavior didn't help. He was always into drinking, me, my mother, we were always trying to keep him away from the party life. Escobar, he was having an increasing issue with his illicit drug use and his, not-called

10:22beverage problem, drinking too much. After another deportation, Escobar illegally re-entered the US again in 2016 and went straight to the Board of Immigration Appeals. He said he was in fear for his life back in El Salvador. And this was when all the gangs were still going on. I remember one time that he ended up in the hospital because they almost murdered him. They hit him with machetes on his head, on his hands. If you were to see pictures of him, he has scars everywhere. They almost killed him over there. I saw something different in his eyes. You can tell that there was something different when he came back. A judge granted a stay on Escobar being deported again while his case was being reviewed.

11:23In 2018, Escobar went to live with his uncle, Rahelio. My uncle, Rahelio, Escobar opened his doors to everybody in his family that needed it. He was a great man. Despite having a home, Escobar found it difficult to get work. He struggled a lot because every time he was at a job, he was always fighting with the other employees. He was very aggressive. He didn't like nobody telling them what to do. I met Ramon, not on very many occasions. I met him maybe three, four times. Ramon wasn't somebody you wanted to be around. I guess that's the only way I could put it. The way of his being, it scared you. Escobar's anger turned towards his cousin. He started building a jealousy over me having things that he didn't.

12:25He started asking me to give him stuff that he wouldn't work for. Jellice and Raysom. Uncle Rahelio had gotten involved and separated both of them before they could actually get into a physical altercation. He didn't like that my mom and my uncle stopped them from fighting. Escobar's family was fed up with his behavior. It's telling him either you get better or we cannot be in your life. It wouldn't surprise me if Escobar went ahead and twisted that as being, well, it's your fault my life turned out the way it is. It's your fault that you're rejecting me. This is what we call blame externalization. Instead of taking accountability for his actions, he's now going to point that outwards as if it's everybody else's fault. Escobar believed his uncle had disrespected him and made a plan to kill his uncle as a result of this perceived slight. And later, 47-year-old Escobar put his plan into action.

13:33Escobar goes to his uncle's room, asks him for cigarette, really or presumably turns around to find him a cigarette and while he is distracted, Escobar uses a police baton and bashes his uncle over the head repeatedly until he dies. Escobar then stuffed his uncle's body into a large cardboard box. He transported it to a warehouse in southwest Houston where he just essentially discarded him and had dumpstered 48 hours later, Rojaleo's sister Dina started to worry. Your uncle hasn't been home for two days. We thought maybe he's just with somebody in the neighborhood, but she knew there was

14:34something wrong. At that moment in time, Oswados grandma and Oswados mother were living with us in the apartment that we had. Oswados was in the shower and she came and she told me she said, I have to go look for my brother. And I said, well go tell Waldo bye and she said, no, no, no, me, I'll be right back. And she left. Ramones and Dina came to her brother Rihilios house to search for him. Now when Aunt Dina showed up, Ramone was there and he was closely watching his Aunt Dina's search efforts. Ramone took the opportunity to enter her van and hide in it, waiting for her to come out to the van and when she did, he launched his attack on Dina. He strangled her from behind, eventually dragging her to the ground, continuing to

15:38strangle her. He also knelt on her chest using his entire body weight, causing her to suffocate to death. Ramones Kamar takes his ons body and hides it in a dumpster. He then takes the van and burns it on a beach near Gaufston, Texas. The way Ramone killed his aunt and uncle is absolutely brutal. These are the people that have taken care of him for most of his adult life. This is where the evil in Escobar really rears its ugly head because the way that he kills his aunt is extremely personal. He is face to face with her. He has his knees on her chest, likely looking into her eyes as she's taking her last breath. This is the woman that acted as a second mother that nurtured him and loved him. What that really tells us is how little respect Escobar has for life, even those closest

16:44to him. My uncle's missing, not my mom's missing, Ramone has something to do with it. So me, my sister, my brother got in the car, went to my uncle's house, me and my brother knocked his door down, grabbed him and pulled him outside while my sister was calling the cops. He was acting very suspicious and at that time me and my brother was just so mad that my mom wasn't around, he could see the anger and I said he'd never seen something like that before. Once the cops got there, he knew not to say nothing. That's when the cops seen all the scratches on his neck. And for that reason, he ended up taking him in for interrogation. It was heartbreaking. I knew some foul play had happened. Ramone becomes a person of interest to Texas law enforcement as they open a missing person's

17:48investigation. But after they question him and can't hold him because there's no evidence he gets in his car and he just starts driving west pretty much until he hits the Pacific Ocean and ends up in Santa Monica, California. Back in Texas, Dean his family's fate hoped she was still alive, faded when her burnt out van was discovered on a beach near Galveston. We already knew it. Once you find a van burnt like that and he's gone, I've never had a feeling as horrible as that one that day. My sisters, my brothers, hearts were broke in that day. While Houston police urgently sought Escobar for further questioning, he was hiding out

18:49in Santa Monica. Santa Monica is a beautiful place located in Los Angeles County. It's a beach city. You got a pier with amusement parks, sand, a lot of restaurants, very tourist area. But there's another side of life to the city. Santa Monica has an issue with homelessness much like the rest of Southern California. It's not as pronounced as in Los Angeles proper. It is common to find people sleeping on the beach out there, specifically under the Santa Monica pair. Leroy was one of those who were unhoused at the time. He was living in a camp on the outskirts of Santa Monica. Living on the streets is one of the most difficult lifestyle situations to be in. One of the main things is being exposed to the elements. You have to worry about your safety, sleeping next to people who are going to take your

19:53things once you drift off to sleep. Once nighttime hits, it gets really, really dangerous, really sketchy, really sketchy. Eleven days after fleeing to California, Escobar was sleeping in his car. He was homeless. But instead of becoming part of the community, he would pray on them. The early morning hours of September 8, Escobar brutally attacked a male subject on a Santa Monica beach. He attacked a homeless man with a baseball bat. Rob Tim.

20:56The subject sustained severe head injuries and was subsequently transported to a nearby hospital after being discovered by police. However, even though the subject did survive and eventually was released from the hospital, he had no recollection of the attack whatsoever and could provide no suspect information at all. Just 48 hours later, Escobar struck again. The man was a 51-year-old victim. The man named Juan Antonio Ramirez, he is also living in Santa Monica, also homeless, also sleeping on the beach. Sometime around dawn, Escobar strikes the man in and about the head. Juan Ramirez was in a coma for years after the attack, but eventually succumbed to his injuries in January of 2021. Escobar, he was robbing people to get money, to get food, and the softest targets he could

22:00pick were sleeping homeless people. These attacks did not make the news. Unfortunately, violence against the homeless community in Southern California is not an uncommon crime. Sadly, if you ask around here a lot of the times, if you're average person, even your average police officer, here's about an attack on a homeless person. Their first assumption is that they got into a fight with another homeless person. Escobar, any idea that there was a pattern killer, doesn't come into focus until a little bit later. Over the next few days, Escobar attacked two more individuals who were homeless. They were fortunate to survive. He would then go on to commit a crime so visible it would be impossible to ignore. We're standing in downtown Los Angeles, we're right over there, and they intersected in a flowered wheelchair. We're going to Escobar, attack three men while they were sleeping outside, all of them were homeless.

23:01Escobar come up behind these three men while they're sleeping. He hits them over the head and shoulders with a baseball bat one at a time, and then rifles through their possessions, stealing money, belongings, whatever he could get from them. Two of those men later died from their injuries. The men killed while they slept. We're 59-year-old Kelvin Williams and Brandon Wright out, who was 24. It's really showing how predatory and kind of a bully Escobar is. Homeless people are not great targets to rob. They don't have a lot of possessions, they don't have a lot of money, so why are you robbing homeless people is the very first question. They're so vulnerable, a lot of them are malnourished. It would have been so easy for Escobar to maybe hit them, take whatever small belongings they have and move about his way. That's not what he did. So to me, that says that Escobar's motivation was actually not robbery, Escobar went after

24:01them because he enjoyed killing, and he knew that he could very easily kill homeless people because he had very easily killed his own family members, which just tells me he's evil to his core. This was the crime that finally put him on the radar of local law enforcement and made pretty clear to the public that we had a serial killer on the loose targeting homeless men in Los Angeles. An investigation was launched, releasing CCTV of Escobar, captured just after his latest attacks. The LAPD hoped to pinpoint the killer. Today we're requesting a public's assistance in identifying an individual responsible for three brutal attacks yesterday morning in central area. The most distinctive thing about this individual is that he has bowed legs.

25:02This is a violent predator that's walking around, playing on innocent people. We want to get them as quickly as possible. There is this boogie man, this specter, just like lurking in the night. You could go to bed and never wake up again if this guy chose to rob you. Escobar's potential victims were the hardest to warn. We had no idea that he was on the loose or that we had to be worried about something like that at all. We don't have the news. We don't have television to see what's going on in society or it happened yesterday or the day before. The publicity didn't deter serial killer Escobar. Just three days after the murders downtown, he strikes again. Escobar attacks two more homeless people. Leaving them severely injured.

26:02And again, he goes back to a familiar hunting ground. He goes back to the beach at Santa Monica. 39-year-old Stephen Cruz Jr., a father of two, was sleeping under the Santa Monica pier. He had many jobs, but one of which he was commonly engaged in was working on a charter fishing boat that he would sometimes sleep under the pier to avoid having to drive back to the San Gabriel area. Escobar looking to rob. He attacks Cruz with the bat. Seriously, injures and kills Mr. Cruz. This is a man with children. This is a man with a job who apparently was just in the absolute wrong place at the absolute wrong time.

27:06Committing crimes at random across LA County, it was proving impossible for police to track the serial killer down. What he struck again, Leroy was his next victim. He walked up and it was still daytime and he shook my hand, he had a strong grip. When I first seen him, I had no idea of the beach that was inside of him at all. He just looked like a normal, warmness guy and he's kind of muscular, you know, and I'm a little guy. I wasn't going to get too close to him, you know what I mean? As night fell, Escobar approached Leroy again. And he wants to lay right next to where I was at and I told him, you know, we don't know who you are. I trust you. The people that were in the camp that I was at, none of us knew him. I told him to go at the end of where we were at and set himself up down there.

28:10He looked at the where I was pointing to and he understood it and he just walked away but that, yeah, that's what I was seeing like, okay, he gets it but he's not happy about that. After that night, Escobar came to Leroy asking him if he knew where he could get drugs. I told him, I know how I could hook you up with that. So just hold on. Let me put on some shoes and I went inside of my tent to put those shoes on. While Leroy crouched down, Escobar suddenly attacked. All I feel is like a ton of bricks fell on the back of my head just out of nowhere. I did not even know he was attacked. I didn't know what that was. So I'm trying to come out out of the tent and when I came out of the tent, he went for a head blow and that's when I got struck in my head. The next blow, I caught him like here.

29:10I have a little martial arts training. So I tried to hip toss him, not knowing that he had already shattered this elbow here. So when I turned and did that, I ended up falling. So that's when he was able to just keep pounding on my back. The right side of my body just from the top to the bottom. He would not stop beating on me until I just laid still and let him finish until he thought I was dead and walked away. And then I'm just sitting there bleeding and I'm just in my head thinking like, oh my god, I'm on my way to heaven. And early conscious, Leroy managed to alert help from the passerby. Told them to call the police for me and that that point, that's when I faded out. I drifted off into another world. Till I woke up in the hospital like, okay, I'm still here.

30:15Escobar's savages salt on Leroy with a bolt cutter left him with multiple broken bones and lacerations. He also had to undergo an emergency craniotomy to remove part of his skull. He hit me so hard in my head that it made some of my skull fractures threaten to poke my brain. I looked like I had just come through, through hell. A police detective visited Leroy at the hospital and showed him the CCTV footage from the press conference. He pulled himself on up and said, I just want to know is this the man that attacked you? And when I looked at it and I could see his shape, I knew that that was the man and I said, yeah, that's him. I did not know that he had just come from murdering someone in Santa Monica. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that I had came face to face with the devil. Pure evil.

31:19The identity of this devil was still unknown to the police and he continued to kill. On September 24th, Escobar returned to the Santa Monica area where he brutally attacked Jorge Martinez on the beach. Martinez, unfortunately, also eventually succumbed to his injuries following the severe damage inflicted by Escobar. With all the signs pointing to another attack from the killer they were hunting, police scoured the streets nearby. And they go looking in the immediate vicinity and not far from there. They find Escobar walking funny, walking pole egg it is was depicted on the CCTV footage of the downtown LA attacks and they arrest him and they find the pair of both cutters on his person. Police had finally caught the man terrorizing LA County.

32:21Additionally, they located Escobar's black Honda CRV part nearby where they located the murder weapon, the baseball bat that was used to brutally kill his victims. Following Escobar's arrest police held a press conference confirming they'd caught the man who had been menacing the two cities. Based on the collaborative work by the Santa Monica Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department, we were able to capture this suspect. The people that live, work and visit Santa Monica and Los Angeles are safer today because this suspect is in custody. The next thing you know, they had caught him. He's a coward because you have to wait till these people go to sleep before you do anything

33:26like you had me face to face twice. You shook my hand but you waited till I went inside of the tent. The people that he targeted was these homeless people who have nothing. They can't even fight. Taking them from their families, taking them out of existence, that's just nothing but a coward. Nothing but a coward. The news reached Oswaldo's family in Texas. We were in disbeliefs. We just couldn't believe that all this was going on. I never believed that somebody in our family would end up becoming something like that because we were all raised a lot better than that. Soon after his arrest in California, Houston police questioned Escobar about the disappearance of his aunt and uncle. He eventually confessed to their murders and disposing of their bodies at a landfill site.

34:28The people that raise them, the people that give them their hand, they give everything after back and you turn around and brutally murder these people. It's horrible. It was horrible for the whole family, which is all not the same anymore without her. In my heart, there is no repaint, something like that that he did. Taken somebody so innocent in the form that he did, there's no justice to that. Escobar ultimately pleaded guilty to all five murders. He was accused of in Los Angeles and the murders of his aunt and uncle in Texas, as well as multiple counts of attempted murder and robbery. The only condition he made in exchange for his plea was that he would not face the death penalty. As a result, he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. I'm not surprised Escobar made a deal to avoid the death penalty. Escobar strikes me as a very cowardly person as somebody who's not willing to take accountability

35:31for their actions, for the fact that he took the lives of so many people and he's looking out for himself. He doesn't want to die, it's all about him. The judge asked him if he was guilty of murdering my mother, he laughed and said very guilty. The whole time he was just giving me this stare, wishing it was me and not him in that chair. After conviction, Escobar was transferred from county jail to North Kern state prison, before he would be temporarily housed until it was decided what penitentiary he would be sent to. From my experience working in the California Department of Corrections, I have had the

36:34experience of working around serial killers in prison. Usually those individuals, when they're around the 40, they're very quiet and very respectful. They almost seem to act against victims that are prey. Escobar's cellmate was 53-year-old Juan Villanueva. He arrived at North Kern state prison after being sentenced to life for aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14. Juan Villanueva finds himself with the unfortunate role of her known Escobar's cellmate. It didn't take long for Escobar to develop a strong dislike for Villanueva. On the morning of February 24th at approximately 8.49 a.m., inmate Villanueva, who was the

37:35cellmate of Escobar, missed one of his medical appointments to have his blood pressure taken. The correctional officer in the unit, data security and welfare check. The correctional officer noticed Villanueva's lifeless body, unresponsive. He then summoned a Code 1 medical emergency, where the response came, they tried life-saving measures on Villanueva, and then they ultimately transferred him to an outside hospital where he was pronounced deceased. The correctional officer searched the cell and they located a letter that had been written by Escobar clearly citing five reasons that he killed Villanueva. The first reason Escobar gave was Villanueva refused to shower or clean the cell properly.

38:36To provide the exact quote in the letter, he stank like f***ing. On that list of motives that Escobar left, number five on the list said he did not want to take me serious, so it was time for him to meet the devil. Escobar explained to prison staff that he killed Villanueva by using his bare hands to strangle into death. He stated that it took approximately five minutes before the job was done and he was able to successfully kill Mr. Villanueva. Escobar shows us that his reasons for murder are just as flimsy as the last ones. I was just murdering because I needed the money. I was just murdering because I felt disrespected. He's very selfish, but yet at his core, I don't believe that Escobar actually likes

39:38himself as a human being and as a result, he's incapable of liking or loving anybody else. On September 18th, 2023, Escobar was charged with the first degree murder of Villanueva. If Escobar is convicted, that would be his eighth murder conviction. With as many victims as the infamous East Bay Slayer, Ramon Escobar's security was upgraded accordingly to protect those incarcerated alongside him. Escobar is currently being held in a California state prison in Sacramento. It is a high maximum security institution, it's a very dangerous and very volatile prison.

40:42Moving forward, Escobar will never have another cellmate. It is affixed on his file, everywhere he goes, he should not be held with anybody else. Escobar's actions scarred the lives of many, not just the ones he took. I'm still feeling the effects of that attack. When I stand up from this position right now, it's going to be pain in my hips, it's pain in my knees. One more thing is that that actually would help me get off of the substances, too. If he wouldn't have tried to kill me, I wouldn't have been reunited with my family. I wouldn't be looking like this today right now, it was flat.

41:48As Waldo and his brother and sisters also had to rebuild their lives after the loss of their mother, Deena. We weren't even able to retrieve her body from the dump site where she was thrown at. My uncle too, we weren't able to salvage his body. Because it had already been three months, they were saying that we probably wouldn't even get bones back, there's never really going to be any closure for us. Denied the chance to bury their loved ones, as Waldo's family celebrate their lives instead. The impact my mother and my uncle had in us, they showed us how to be family, how to love our children, how to love each other. Deena Escobar, Eru Helio Escobar, two of the greatest people that have walked this world. We really, really miss her and him when my mother-in-law went missing, unknowingly I was a

42:53month and a half pregnant with my oldest daughter, and that's why we decided to call her after her grandma. But there's one family member, they choose to forget. Ramon Escobar, this man is evil in so many ways and I know that he is where he's supposed to be and God has a last word with him. When he decided to hurt somebody in our family, he is not family, he is nothing to us. Escobar is not human in my mind. He's an empty vessel, he's violence wrapped in human skin, who does nothing but pray like a coward on the vulnerable and the defenseless. When I found out who he was and what he had done, I was even more thankful for God that

43:53I even made it because he was really a straight beast, just a monster.