CLICK HERE if you’re having a problem viewing the photos on a mobile device.
SAN JOSE — A Redwood City man has been charged with murder on allegations he confronted his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend in a Los Altos backyard and killed him with multiple gunshots from behind, according to police and court documents.
Edgar Lainez-Portillo, 25, was charged Wednesday and appeared in a San Jose courtroom where he was arraigned on the murder count and a firearm enhancement in the killing last week of 48-year-old Union City resident Roberto Rivera. It was the first homicide in Los Altos since 1994.
A Los Altos police investigative summary submitted to prosecutors states the defendant was dating an ex-girlfriend of Rivera, but a precise motive remains unclear. The woman told investigators that while Lainez-Portillo “exhibited jealously about another boyfriend, he had never expressed any serious (jealousy) towards Victim Rivera,” according to the document by Sgt. Cameron Shearer.
Deputy District Attorney Bryan Slater said authorities have not uncovered any prior contact between the defendant and victim.
Lainez-Portillo was arrested Saturday following an investigation that came to include work from the District Attorney’s Office; police from Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Jose; and the Santa Clara County and San Mateo County sheriff’s offices.
“We appreciate the hard work of the Los Altos Police Department, our bureau of investigation and our law enforcement partners that allowed them to solve case in five days,” Slater said. “We look forward to bringing justice to Roberto Rivera and his family.”
Los Altos police were called around 10:50 a.m. May 4 to a home on Highlands Circle for a report of a shooting victim. Responding officers found Rivera “slumped over on his knees, in the backyard, with apparent gunshot wounds to the back and head,” Shearer wrote.
Police said Rivera had been on the property doing masonry work.
Investigators reviewed home security video and found that a camera facing the front of the home captured a suspect pulling up to the property on a blue motorcycle with gold rims, and wearing a mostly black motorcycle outfit with a black full-face helmet. The motorcyclist could be seen entering a side yard and “pulling a handgun out of his jacket as he leaves the view of the camera,” Shearer wrote.
The video captures the sounds of the intruder racking the handgun, followed by four gunshots. Then, police say, the motorcyclist is seen running out of the yard and riding away.
Lainez-Portillo’s girlfriend and a neighbor both confirmed to the detectives that the defendant rode a 2003 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R similar to what was seen at the shooting.
Part of what brought detectives to Lainez-Portillo’s girlfriend was a search of Rivera’s home that turned up a copy of an August 2017 police report describing an domestic-violence encounter between the woman and Rivera, Shearer wrote.
The woman told the homicide investigators that Lainez-Portillo was her current boyfriend, but also that she ended the relationship three days before the shooting.
Police then obtained an arrest warrant and search warrant for Lainez-Portillo. At his house, they seized his motorcycle helmet, jacket and boots, and found his motorcycle, covered, in the front yard.
The case might have been largely circumstantial — there was no mention in court documents about a handgun being recovered as evidence — if it weren’t for one more witness account given to police, from a woman who told investigators that she attended a party with Lainez-Portillo on Friday night in which he reportedly “told her that he had ‘done something bad.’ ” Shearer wrote that when she asked him about it, he reportedly said to her “that he had killed someone.”
This witness also affirmed that the motorcycle shown in the home security video belonged to Lainez-Portillo and that the suspect’s clothing and physical build led “her to believe that the person in the video” was the defendant, Shearer wrote.
After his arraignment Wednesday, Lainez-Portillo was remanded to the Santa Clara County Main Jail and is scheduled to return to court June 23 in the Palo Alto courthouse, presuming that facility is no longer closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.