The DA took another crack at it, but the jury deadlocked again, this time even more weighted in Smith’s favor: 11 to 1. Anthony was, by all accounts, dynamite on the witness stand. He wept, he smiled; he radiated strength and humility; the jurors loved him. By the time the case was dismissed in December 2004, he had spent 17 months in jail.
Many of his supporters attended both trials, including members of his Episcopalian church and a business consultant, Vito Rotunno, who is godfather to one of Anthony’s three children. Vito visited him after the trials were over and he says he found a changed man.
“He was very paranoid,” Vito says. “He was not reading things correctly. He thought I was talking to the police.” Anthony would say and do strange things, Vito says, but didn’t seem to realize they were strange. “I think he has a multifaceted personality,” Vito says. “He’s been in some really tough places, and he’s been on the top of the food chain.”
Vito says he ended the relationship. “Finally I said, ‘If you can’t talk straight to me, there’s no reason for us to talk.’ I guess I was around him during a good time, and then I saw his descent into not having fun.”
In the early-morning hours of October 7, 2008, Sergeants Marty Rodriguez and Robert Gray of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department found themselves driving north on the Antelope Valley Freeway to Lancaster, a city they had no fondness for because they only knew it through their jobs. They saw the streets of Lancaster as a series of murder scenes: this shooting, that witness, this meth deal gone wrong. Besides murder, it was sand. Miles and miles of sand and scrub, broken up by houses and little shops where people killed each other.
There, on an empty stretch of road outside the city limits, Rodriguez and Gray examined the body of a thirtyish Hispanic man slumped into a pool of his own blood. He had a black eye and bruises and cuts on his back, as if he had been punched and savagely kicked before being shot to death. (The murder weapon was later determined to be a nine-millimeter.) The identification in his pocket showed the man to be Maurilio Ponce, and soon the detectives were sitting with his widow, Angie, who told them he had left the night before, driving her white Lincoln Navigator, and that yes, of course he had his cell phone with him. The police had found no cell phone and no Navigator. But it didn’t take long for them to get hold of Maurilio’s phone records, which showed a series of calls to Anthony Smith in the hours before his death.
The week before Maurilio was murdered, he took off work from his diesel-mechanic business. He stayed home and played with the kids, reading them stories by the fireplace and dancing with the three of them in the living room of the ranch house he and Angie had just bought. It was almost like he knew . . . Angie says. Maurilio was 31 years old, with a wry sense of humor. Restless. A pusher and a driver. He and Angie had met when they were teenagers, both working at McDonald’s, only Maurilio was also holding down jobs at Taco Bell and a little Mexican restaurant in town, sending money back to his family in Mexico, putting his younger brother through college and graduate school. After they married, they set up shop, starting the business in 2001 with one used tire. Now Piki’s Truck Repair had three employees and contracts with national trucking companies like Mayflower and U-Haul.
Two nights before his murder, Maurilio woke abruptly, his heart careening inside his chest, frightened, though he couldn’t remember his dream. “Just hold me,” he said to Angie. On Monday evening, October 6, Maurilio told Angie he might have to go out that night. He had business with a buddy named Tony.
It was 9:30 P.M., and down in LA, according to law enforcement officers, Maurilio’s death was already in motion. Through phone records, the detectives identified calls made between Maurilio, Anthony Smith, and two other men, Charles “Chucky Cheese” Honest and Dewann White, that enabled them to track their movements that night. Each time any of these men used his phone, the officers could see where he was, as the call bounced off nearby cell towers. It’s not a precise homing technique—the activated phone could be down the block from the tower or a few miles away—but it puts the phone in an area. So at 9:14, there was Dewann’s phone pinging off a tower near Cheese’s place in south LA. Thirty minutes later, that phone was moving west toward Marina del Rey, where Anthony lived. At 10:20, Maurilio called Anthony; both men seemed to be in or near their homes. Thirty-six minutes later, Maurilio called again, but now Anthony’s phone was on the move—30 miles north, using a tower alongside the 405.