Baja Prosecutor Gunned Down; Body Crushed by Van

Assassins gunned down a ranking state prosecutor and crushed him under the wheels of a van in front of his home in an exclusive suburb of Tijuana, authorities said Saturday.

The execution-style slaying of Odin Gutierrez Rico on Friday night was the latest in a series of grisly killings that have earned Tijuana comparisons to Al Capone’s Chicago.

Seven senior federal law enforcement officers from Baja California have been slain during the past year. U.S. anti-drug experts believe that most of the killings are drug-related and some of the victims may have been corrupt.

Gutierrez, third in charge of the Tijuana office of the state attorney general at 32, was described by his colleagues as a driven, aggressive prosecutor whose resume of high-profile investigations could have earned him any number of enemies among the Tijuana drug cartel.

“He worked on very sensitive cases,” said Roberto Martinez, one of the attorneys who worked for him. “He had a very promising career. We are all very disturbed by this.”

Gutierrez rose to prominence early in his career when, as a special state prosecutor, he tackled the investigation of the 1994 ambush death of reform-minded Tijuana city police chief Federico Benitez Lopez--just after Benitez had reportedly turned down a $100,000 bribe from narcotics traffickers.

Among those Gutierrez prosecuted for the crime were two former federal police commanders with alleged underworld connections, Martinez said. Both are still at large.

Gutierrez was also assigned to the prickly state investigation of one of Baja’s most notorious law enforcement scandals, a bloody March 1994 incident in which corrupt judicial police attacked anti-drug agents while they were trying to arrest a drug baron and whisked him off to safety.

“He was young, very impetuous and very ingenious,” said Victor Clark, an independent human rights leader in Tijuana. “They ought to assign more seasoned prosecutors to the sensitive cases. Sending someone like him is like sending someone to their death.”

At the time of his death, Gutierrez was the supervisor of a cadre of state prosecutors who handle such crimes as murders and kidnappings.

Gutierrez had arrived home with his wife and 8-year-old daughter at 10:30 p.m. Friday and had sent them inside while he parked the car in his garage on Calle Mar Adriatico in Seccion Mediterraneo of upscale Lomas Agua Caliente, state Atty. Gen. Jose Luis Anaya Bautista told a news conference.

Out of the darkness stepped four men with AK-47 assault rifles and Uzi guns, Anaya said. Gunmen pumped dozens of rounds into Gutierrez, and more than 120 spent shells were found on the pavement, Anaya said.

Tijuana coroner Gustavo Salazar said the autopsy showed that they also ran over Gutierrez several times in a vehicle described by Anaya as a van--a detail that Clark said gave the killing “the grotesque seal of the Mafia.”

Anaya said he could not speculate on who might have killed Gutierrez. He said he felt “anger, tremendous anger.”