Dispatch: Kevin Ramos, 23
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Practically everyone in the Martinez house wears some kind of uniform. Norma Martinez, the mother, wears a light green shirt and pants to her job on the janitorial staff at LAX. Her husband, a truck technician, has a blue jumpsuit with his name embroidered on the lapel. Her son Jeffrey, 19, wore the uniform of a baggage handler at LAX. A daughter-in-law is a dental hygienist. A son-in-law has a white shirt and badge like a police officer’s for his job as a security guard.
Family members take public transportation across very long distances, split housing, share the work of caring for various children. Into this archetypal L.A. working-class immigrant family came a phone call last February with news of the murder of the eldest son, Kevin Ramos, 23.
Ramos had been helping his father-in-law throw a house party for extra money that night in the 18000 block of Northam Street in Valinda, and was shot by would-be guests who had been turned away. ‘We thought he’d been shot in the arm or the leg,’ said Kevin’s sister, Jacqueline. At the Harbor-UCLA medical center, they were taken into a room and told that he had died. ‘It’s the worst feeling,’ Jacqueline said. ‘It grabs you and tears you apart.’
‘I sat there with his body and it’s still hard to accept it,’ said Jeffrey.
As the weeks passed and the case was no closer to being solved, the family struggled. Jeffrey suffered from depression and stopped working. Jacqueline kept calling the detectives over and over, to no avail.
Norma Martinez, an evangelical Christian, prayed for strength. Her worst moments, she says, come at work while cleaning the floors and bathrooms, when her thoughts wander to Kevin.
Martinez, 44, is a quiet, broad-faced woman with hair parted straight down the middle and pulled back into a plain ponytail. As her grown children talked in a babble of English about Kevin, Martinez sat to one side, head bowed, hands clasped, her feet pulled under her out of view. Her posture is straight out of rural Guatemala--the pose of a first-generation immigrant, long used to remaining in the background, the kind of person one might see with a cleaning bucket in an airport restroom--working invisibly in plain sight.
Kevin Ramos’ niece at home with a photo of her with her uncle.
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Sheriff’s investigators are seeking information about the case. Call (323) 890-5500.
(Photos by Brian Vander Brug/LAT)