Alyssia Kent Barnaid Gets Laid Again
Alyssa Gomez, known every bit Raven, shortly earlier her death
Raven was one of the youngest and toughest Hollywood street runaways, living in alleys and back lots where beatings, drugs and prostitution are still common. Fond to meth, the stunningly beautiful 15-year-old foster kid and runaway turned tricks to buy drugs.
Her real name was Alyssa Gomez, and she was murdered in a cruddy motel in Silver Lake on June 4, 2007. She became the discipline of an L.A. Weekly cover story (June 19, 2008, "Raven: Expiry of a Hollywood Beauty") and the focus of a documentary in the works by actress Dyan Cannon. At 12:15 p.k. on Mon, after about 3 days of deliberations, Gilton Pitre, 38, was convicted of Gomez's murder.
Pitre killed her just days later he was released from prison house on parole. But some say she was doomed past a system that can't preclude runaway kids from spiraling into oblivion. Gomez's mother, now deceased, an alleged 18th Street gang member and drug aficionado, and her alcoholic Mexican father, unsuccessfully fought in children'south court to get custody of her.
Family members say Gomez'southward parents didn't stay off drugs and alcohol long enough to win her and her little sis Edie dorsum from the Los Angeles County Section of Children and Family Services (DCFS).
Her loving grandmother died when Gomez was ix, and the two sisters were shuffled betwixt relatives, the Hollygrove Home for Children and foster homes. Their older sis, Elaina Novoa, a immature mother, sought custody of Gomez and Edie, but DCFS decided that Novoa'south apartment wasn't big plenty.
Past age 15, the independent-minded Alyssa had become Raven. "She swore she would not go back through the county system," said Novoa sadly. "She would say, 'Once I am 18, the organisation volition let me go.' She was fighting the arrangement. She was going to do it her way."
She traded her long black pilus and pink dresses for goth attire and a partially shaved Mohawk, and prophesied her own death in a dark poem that was a trademark of her MySpace writings.
Three days before she was slain, she met with Cannon, who had met Gomez years earlier through some other Hollywood street kid. Moved by her strange life, Cannon interviewed her for a planned documentary featuring troubled children.
Cannon attended opening statements final week, comforting Gomez'south sis Edie during the sometimes-raw testimony. The concluding fourth dimension Cannon saw Gomez, "she was on crystal meth," Cannon told the Weekly. "I begged her to allow me take her to a place where she could get help. I said, 'I pray I don't get a call most a funeral.' … Three days later she was dead."
Pitre strangled Gomez and left her in a deserted aisle behind El Cid Eating house on Dusk Boulevard in Silver Lake. Forty-v days after the murder, armed with evidence from movement-sensor video — afterward they traced the purchase of a comforter that Gomez's body had been wrapped in to the Olive Motel — police arrested Pitre, a convicted rapist and drug dealer. Later, Dna evidence also linked him to her murder.
The 5-foot-7-inch Pitre, who has a tiger tattooed over much of his face, served time in 1994 for burglary. In the late 1990s, he was sentenced to just three years in prison for raping his roommate. According to a search warrant affirmation, Pitre wrapped a string around his roommate's neck to "asphyxiate and command her before he moved her to another room, where he sodomized and raped her."
Just four days earlier killing Gomez, Pitre was again released from prison — this fourth dimension after a conviction for selling marijuana near the Kodak Theatre. He returned to Hollywood, where, co-ordinate to testimony, he saw Gomez on the streets and badgered her into hanging out with him, then killed her.
"Something is terribly wrong when one of our kids can slip through the cracks and terminate up in an alleyway," said Los Angeles County Deputy Commune Attorney Sam Hulefeld during the weeklong trial attended by Elaina Novoa and her sister Edie, now 16 and living with Novoa. Also attending were social workers from My Friend's Place, a drop-in center for Hollywood teens, where Gomez hung out.
Gomez'southward friend Joel Avelar testified that on the evening of her death, he ran into her at the 7 Days Market on Hollywood Boulevard, where the two of them were approached by Pitre, a stranger who wanted to know if Gomez wanted to hang out with him.
Avelar, 22, might non be the ideal witness if this were a trial nearly murder in the suburbs. He's in custody for alleged stealing, and so during his four-hr testimony a deputy stood next to him. Merely this is a trial involving the underbelly of Hollywood, which is thriving despite the billions of public and private dollars spent on redevelopment, trendy clubs and posh hotels. Avelar was a star witness.
Subsequently Gomez told Pitre she'd exist back later, the two friends walked to the 76 gas station on Hollywood Boulevard about Tommy's Hamburgers. But there, they plant him leaning nonchalantly confronting a gas pump. He pestered Gomez, asking, "Are we gonna hang out?" and she replied: "Agree the fuck on. I'll be back."
The 2 teens went to a political party, merely Gomez left. Avelar testified that he never saw her again. In fact, Hulefeld told the jury that Pitre picked upwards Gomez in his gold Cadillac Seville and collection her to the gritty Olive Motel. "When he finished having sex with her, he strangled her till she lost consciousness," he said. "After he killed her, he wrapped her in a hotel bedspread and dumped her in a deserted alley before dawn."
In a disturbing gotcha video that prosecutors say caught Pitre "red-handed," Hulefeld showed footage from a surveillance camera in which Pitre checks into the Olive Motel at eleven:22 p.m. A few minutes later, footage shows him walking to room five with a nighttime-haired girl carrying a black purse. So, at about four a.m., a dissimilar camera captures Pitre toting the black bag and moving his motorcar — with the headlights off — to a parking spot close to room v. Soon after that, a third camera picks up Pitre conveying a big object, wrapped in a comforter, to his automobile.
"They say a picture is worth a thousand words," said Hulefeld as he froze the photo of Pitre carrying the object as the jury watched on a large screen. The silhouette of Gomez'due south head and shoulders was conspicuously visible in the frozen image. "Nobody deserves that. Nobody. She was laid to rest on the same hateful streets she chosen habitation."
Gomez's 40-twelvemonth-old friend John Hurley testified that he met her through a drug dealer at a autobus stop in Hollywood. "She came over with one of my dealers and we got high," he said. "She was very funny. She loved photography."
He invited her to alive with him at his one-sleeping room apartment in Glendale because he "thought she needed protecting." Co-ordinate to Hurley, who is gay, she was suffering from an abscess and wasn't taking her medication. "I insisted she stay with me till her infection went away," he said.
Gomez and her 25-year-old young man, Matthew Kent, stayed with Hurley off and on, getting loftier on meth and sometimes non sleeping for days. Hurley testified that Kent was at his home the entire weekend that Gomez vanished. The defense suggested Kent was responsible for the murder. Asked how he could exist so sure Kent never left his apartment, Hurley testified: "I could see his feet and smell him."
Pitre's defense attorney Thomas Ahearn noted that Kent was arrested for having sex with Gomez as a minor, and that a protection order was at one betoken issued against him, barring him from contact with her.
Ahearn asked Hurley whether letting Kent stay with Gomez at his flat was his idea of "protecting" the girl. Hurley responded: "It was either [Gomez] staying at my place or turning tricks on the street or living, you lot know, in a cardboard box or an alley or getting picked up by someone that she didn't know that wasn't a prophylactic person, and being killed.
"Aye, I thought I was protecting her."
Pitre, stone-faced when the verdict was read, volition be sentenced on June 3.
Says Novoa, "This was a long, long wait. Every family needs justice."
Steve La conducted research for this story.
Contact the writer at cpelisek@laweekly.com.
Featured Local Savings
Source: https://www.laweekly.com/raven-death-of-a-hollywood-beauty/
Post a Comment for "Alyssia Kent Barnaid Gets Laid Again"