Kevan Baker wanted to forget Wanda Lopez's final moments. He ...

738 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711
The twenty-two-year-old Mejia struggled, however, to make
sense of other details the three new witnesses provided, especially the
Arsuagas. Unlike the light-colored sweatshirt Baker described and
the white long-sleeved T-shirt Aguirre saw, the Arsuagas were sure
the man they had seen in their headlights running past the Phase III
nightclub wore a white dress shirt. The Arsuagas described the shirt
in great detail: The sleeves were rolled up, and it was unbuttoned
near where the shirt reached the man’s dark well-pressed “uniformtype”
slacks.
These were not the slovenly clothes Baker described, nor the
blue jeans Aguirre initially recalled. And unlike the unshaven and
mustachioed man Baker saw at the gas station, the man who jogged
east past the Arsuagas was clean-shaven.
The witnesses’ reports about location and timing also
conflicted. The Arsuagas were at the Phase III, more than a football
field east of the Sigmor along the SPID frontage road, when the man
in the dress shirt jogged past at a leisurely pace. John Arsuaga gave
the time as “shortly” or “five minutes” after 8:00 p.m.
This didn’t jibe with Baker’s observation—confirmed by the
manhunt tape—of Wanda Lopez’s attacker still in the gas station
door six minutes later. And it conflicted with Baker’s statement that
the man sprinted in a completely different direction, heading north
“behind” the gas station. That put the suspect near Dodd Street, and
cops swarming the area received reports from “several” people of a
man running north and slightly behind the gas station to Dodd Street
and further north along that street towards McArdle.
Figure 2: TV news videotape of the Sigmor Shamrock gas station on the night of
the stabbing. (Left) Medical technicians work on Wanda Lopez in front of the store
(visible over the hood of the police car) while some of the witnesses (visible over the
top of the white car) look on from near the ice machine. (Right) Close-up of (from
left) George Aguirre, Julie Arsuaga and John Arsuaga.