Forty-eight hours after he had allegedly beaten and burned to death 83-year-old Lila Meizell, Ramon Alvarado put on his new white leather shoes and headed to La Frontera, a Mexican-style cantina at the edge of a Montgomery County strip mall.
It was the day after Thanksgiving, and Alvarado had spent much of the afternoon brooding, hiding the burns on his legs from his housemates. Now he was ready to unwind. His pockets were loaded with cash.
A 32-year-old layabout who had come to the United States from El Salvador a decade earlier, Alvarado lived in the basement of his aunt's house, where he slept on a bare mattress in the laundry room next to the boiler. Small and slight of build, with angular features and heavy eyelids, his friends called him "El Garrobo" — the Iguana. Soon he was buying Miller Lite and shots all around.
Where had the money come from? Alvarado was usually quiet and always broke, but that night he had a newfound swagger. "He was paying for everyone," said Joel Guevara, who was renting the room next to Alvarado's. "But there was something weird about him."
While Alvarado continued drinking, Guevara returned home and went to sleep. He awoke to police dragging him out of bed. Officers were rifling through the house, and when Guevara saw police dogs sniffing around the property, he assumed that his housemates were in trouble for drugs. "I thought, 'So that's where they got the money,' " he said.
'The little grandmother'
But the dogs were following a scent trail of gasoline into Alvarado's room. As police led Alvarado away in handcuffs, an officer took Guevara aside and explained that Alvarado, his cousin Jose Antonio Alvarado and Jose's wife, Ana Rodas, were suspected in the slaying of the kindly elderly woman, whom Jose referred to as "la viejita" (the little old lady) or "la abuelita" (the little grandmother).
"She used to give them sodas and drinks in the summertime and always an extra tip," said Guevara, who no longer lives in the Alvarado home. He let out a deep sigh. "It's sickening."
Court records show that the Alvarados have no criminal convictions. Jose Alvarado and Rodas, both facing the death penalty on first-degree murder charges, were hardworking and meek, family and friends said, with two children at home, Darwin, 13, and David, 10. The men worked as gardeners for Lila Meizell. But then Jose Alvarado stole from her and turned to his wife and cousin for help covering up the crime.
In one afternoon, they allegedly planned and carried out a lurid murder scheme as ill-conceived as it was cruel.
* * *
"I lost my head," said Jose Alvarado, speaking from a pay phone last week inside the Montgomery County jail. "I don't know what to say. It just happened suddenly. I was tempted by demons."
Jose Antonio Alvarado, "Tony" to his friends and family, came to the United States 14 years ago from the Salvadoran city of San Miguel, according to his mother, Maria Alvarado. Friends believe he crossed the border illegally, but like his wife, his cousin Ramon and many Salvadoran and Central American immigrants in the United States, he secured temporary protected status, a form of conditional residency widely granted after Hurricane Mitch, that allowed him to work and live in the United States legally.
Deportation?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs said the agency would not comment on the three suspects' immigration status or background but indicated that ICE has placed detention orders on all three, meaning they would be subject to deportation after serving any prison sentences if convicted. The detention order does not necessarily indicate that the Alvarados were in the country unlawfully, she said.
In the Maryland suburbs, the Alvarados settled into an otherwise quiet life of long hours at low-end jobs. While Rodas worked at a dry cleaner in Rockville, friends said, Jose Alvarado got a job doing landscaping work at the Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase. (The country club would not confirm whether Alvarado worked there.)
"My son is a good man, a nice man," said Maria Alvarado, 53, sitting in the family home in Silver Spring last week. Calls from her grandsons' school were coming in as she searched frantically for a defense lawyer, stunned by the $300-an-hour fees they were asking for.
"He doesn't drink," Maria Alvarado said of her son, trembling. "He doesn't smoke or use drugs."
Troubled financial history
Maria Alvarado said Jose and his wife were not having financial problems. Friends and housemates said the same: that Jose had plenty of work this fall, clearing leaves, trimming hedges, landscaping. His work truck remained parked outside the family home last week, overflowing with tree branches clipped on his last job.
But court records chart a troubled financial history. Ana Rodas filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in 2002, and last year, Jose Alvarado lost a $2,169 judgment to the Montgomery Housing Partnership, a nonprofit group that provides low-income housing. Then, last December, Jose faced criminal charges for passing a bad check, but the case was dropped after he paid back the money.
Meanwhile, the family was living in an increasingly crowded house. Property records show that Jose Alvarado's mother bought the 1,100-square-foot home on Downer Drive for $450,000 in January 2007. At her job preparing salads at Marshall's Bar and Grill in Foggy Bottom, where she says she has worked for 18 years, Maria Alvarado earns $11 an hour and typically works from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., six days a week.
To cover the mortgage, Maria Alvarado packed her home with boarders. Jose, Ana and their two sons slept upstairs with her. Another cousin, Inmar Alvarado, slept in the living room on the couch. She rented one basement room to Joel Guevara for $400 a month and another basement space to a couple with a child, who also moved out after Meizell's slaying.
Her nephew Ramon settled into the laundry room with an old television, covering the windows with towels. For privacy, he hung a bedsheet between his mattress and the washer and dryer area. His clothes were still scattered there last week, including the rumpled black pants he wore to La Frontera the night of his arrest.
* * *
Lila Meizell was one of Jose Alvarado's best customers, and every few weeks he would show up to tend to the small yard outside her brick rambler on Inwood Avenue in Wheaton. He also did whatever odd jobs she needed.
"That old lady would hug him when he arrived," said Inmar Alvarado, 45, who went to work at Meizell's house with Alvarado on a few occasions. "She was so nice."
Worry
He remembers one visit to Meizell's when Jose pointed to the woman's back steps, which needed repair. "She's going to fall and kill herself," Alvarado said then — worrying about the safety of a woman whose killing he allegedly would plot a few months later.
On Nov. 19, Alvarado received a check from Meizell for $75, according to his statement to police. He added two zeros to the amount, depositing the $7,500 check and withdrawing the money as cash. Soon he began to fret: What would happen when Meizell checked her bank statement?
The plot was hatched in the Alvarados' bedroom Nov. 26, according to testimony Alvarado provided to police. After telling his wife and cousin of the check fraud, Ramon Alvarado proposed a solution. For $1,200, he would kill the old woman. The three then discussed the best way to kill Meizell, according to police, and it was Ana Rodas who suggested that they burn the house down to destroy the crime scene.
In a Dodge minivan, Jose and Ramon Alvarado drove to Inwood Avenue, 10 minutes away, and parked down the street from Meizell's house. Shortly before 8 p.m., Jose Alvarado approached the door, and when Meizell answered, he asked her for $43 she owed him for other yard work. She was on the phone with her boyfriend, Roosevelt Saverino, and she told him Jose was at the door.
Ramon stood lurking in the dark, hidden behind Jose.
"She said, 'Wait a second, don't hang up,' " Saverino recalled. Meizell didn't seem worried.
Then the line went dead.
As Jose Alvarado walked away with the $43 check, Ramon charged the door and forced his way inside to attack Meizell, according to Ramon's statement to police. She screamed as Ramon choked and beat her, slamming her head into various pieces of furniture. As Jose waited outside in the van, Ramon checked Meizell's pulse and believed her to be dead.
Shopping spree
Next, according to Ramon's confession to police, he poured gasoline over her body and the living room floor. He struck a match, then dropped it onto the still-breathing Meizell. The room burst into flames. So did his pants, and Ramon burned both legs, diving onto Meizell's lawn to extinguish the flames. Reluctant to seek medical treatment for fear of being caught, they drove home. Police and firefighters were already en route.
Back in the bedroom where they had hatched the plan, Ramon detailed how he had killed Meizell, according to Ana Rodas's testimony to police. Jose then paid his cousin the agreed-upon $1,200 and handed over $1,000 to his wife. A shopping spree started soon after.
Two days later, when Joel Guevara came home from a Thanksgiving trip to see his children, Jose Alvarado's newly purchased late-1990s Volvo sedan was parked out front. And Darwin and David were asking him for help setting up their new computer.
* * *
"How can you do that to someone and then sleep at night?" asked Meizell's daughter in a phone interview last week. A Northern Virginia resident, she spoke on condition of anonymity so that she could grieve in private. She did not know the Alvarados, nor that her mother hired them for yard work. "They will remember her and have to live with this for the rest of their lives," she said.
On the front porch of Meizell's boarded-up home, where paramedics tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate her, friends and loved ones have set up a makeshift memorial among the broken glass and charred debris. Her lawn ornaments had been knocked over, but her yard was still tidy from the last time Jose Alvarado picked up the leaves.
"She was always out in her yard, and everyone in the neighborhood knew her," said Rob Segreti, who lives next door and often watched the Alvarados out his window.
'Regret'
From jail, Jose Alvarado said he is wracked with remorse and desperate to get out. Who would care for his children? Why did his wife get dragged into this?
"This is a nightmare," he said in Spanish. "You feel the regret."
"I know this creates a negative image of Hispanics," he said. "Americans are going to think that we're all the same, that we're all criminals."
But why had he done it? Maybe he would have gone to jail briefly for a check-fraud conviction, but now his family is shattered and he, his wife, and his cousin are facing capital murder charges.
It was sudden, impulsive temptation, he said. "Demons."
After the prepaid call ran out, his mother tried to explain further. Someone had hurled two eggs at their house several weeks before, she said — the first bad omen. Back in El Salvador, Ramon's mother went to a psychic to find out what it meant.
The psychic told her someone had placed a curse on the family, and for $300 more, she could protect them. But the family didn't pay. Ten days later, the home was hit with eggs again, and the crusted mess was still visible last week. "Witchcraft," said Maria Alvarado, in Spanish. "Witchcraft made them do it."
Staff writer Matt Zapotosky and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
