Episode 7 - Karma

At Leslie's, we've got pools down to a science. Our free water test gives you answers fast.
When sunshine plus cannonballs equals the perfect afternoon, you can trust your water's good to go. Leslie's uses advanced technology to analyze 10 elements of your pool's water chemistry in just 60 seconds.
Your personalized treatment plan tells you exactly what your pool needs. It's not rocket science, it's pool science, and we kind of love that.
Come in for your free treatment plan. Find your store at lesliespool.com.

Leslie's. we know pools.
Discover the value of driving with Mizeh Chevrolet, your trusted destination for new and used Chevrolet vehicles in Vacaville, Napa, and Fairfield. Conveniently located just off Highway 80 at the Leisure Town Road exit, we offer a wide selection to suit your needs.

Whether you're looking for a reliable family car, truck, or SUV,

Mizeh Chevrolet has you covered.

Stop in or visit MizehChevrolet.com today.

Mizeh Chevrolet. Together we drive.

It was a little before 11 a.m. on July 1st, 2021.
A Thursday, right before July 4th weekend. Everyone on the road seemed to be in a hurry, trying to squeeze in one last thing before the holiday.
Including Susie. She was running a work errand to the post office when her cell phone rang.
It was her cousin, Mimi Garcia. Mimi had been managing the Justice for Daisy Instagram account, along with one of Daisy's friends.
Together, they'd been sifting through DMs from people who claimed they'd spotted Victor. They didn't want to overwhelm Susie or give her false hope, so they only passed along the most promising leads.
Susie knew this, and now she was anxious to know why Mimi was calling. But her cousin was insistent that she pull over.
After some back and forth, Susie agreed. And that's when her cousin shared the news.
Somebody had messaged the Justice for Daisy Instagram account. And this person said that not only had he seen Victor, he knew him.
Actually, he knew Billy. That's the name Victor was apparently going by.
They worked together at a bar in Mexico, and he had a video to prove it. Susie was confused.
Tons of people had reported seeing Victor around LA. So how could he be in Mexico? And why would he be working at a bar? Susie wanted to see the video, but there was a catch.
The guy who offered it wanted money. He said that Victor, or Billy, or whoever, owed him money, and that if he got arrested, he wouldn't get his money back.
So he had to get it somewhere else. Susie was skeptical.
It was a huge risk. Because what if the man never sent the video? Or what if he did and it turned out to not be Victor in it? But her cousin had already thought this through.
She'd told the guy in her DMs that she needed to know for sure the video was legit. And he came up with a solution.
He said he'd send her a snippet of the video,

a sampling of the product before she bought it.

It would disappear immediately after she viewed it in her DMs,

and if she wanted to keep it, it would cost her.

When the video arrived in Mimi's DMs,

she took a deep breath and clicked on the play icon.

She had hoped to take a screen recording,

but she was so nervous that her hands froze.

Before the video ended, she realized she had just enough time to take a screenshot. And that's when she called Susie.
She needed her to look at the screenshot and tell her. Was it him? It's why she was so insistent that Susie pull over.
Susie sat in her car, waiting for her cousin's text to arrive. When it did, she immediately opened it.
The resolution wasn't great, but the photo clearly showed a man sitting at a high-top table with at least one other person. There was a bucket of beer and a few bottles on the table.
The man's elbow was propped up, and he was holding a cigarette between his fingers. He didn't have any of the distinctive features that were displayed on the photos of Victor.
For one thing, he didn't have dark hair. It was bleached, or at least, like, the middle of it was.
He wore a long-sleeved shirt, so no visible tattoos. And his face was turned to one side, and his hand was covering his ear.
But Susie didn't need to rely on hair color or tattoos or ear piercings to know that it was Victor. She took one look at the screenshot and she knew instantly.
It was him. This man so casually smoking a cigarette at a bar.
This was the man who had murdered her daughter. I'm Jen Swan.
From London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer, Paris Hilton. This is my friend Daisy.
Episode 7, Karma. Seeing Victor in that photo, Susie told me, it did something to her.
Those were the words that she used in our interview. It did something to me.
There was something about how he looked in that image. He just looked so completely unbothered that just drove Susie crazy.
Before seeing that screenshot, she had imagined that maybe Victor had been hiding out somewhere, living in the shadows, on the fringes. She had considered that maybe Victor had made his way across the border, but whatever she pictured, it was not this.
Victor in a bar, out in the open, out of the shadows. There was something else about it that really did not sit right with Susie.
And that was the type of bar that Victor had apparently been recognized in. It's called Papa's and Beer.
Maybe you've heard of it. It's not this, like, underground, hole-in-the-wall dive bar.
It's one of the most popular nightclubs in all of Baja, a place so massive that it calls itself the West Coast's largest beach club, and so touristy that it offers its own

shuttle service from San Diego. It was just about the last place that Susie had expected Victor to

show his face. To her, the screenshot telegraphed an almost incomprehensible message that Victor thought he was going to get away with murder.
I actually tracked down the guy who sent this DM. I found his Instagram handle in the screenshot that Susie had texted to me, the one that her cousin had texted to her.
I had a phone conversation with this guy over WhatsApp. And maybe this shouldn't have surprised me, but he actually tried to make a deal with me too.
He didn't want to do the interview unless he got paid for it. But just as he'd eventually given in and sent the screenshot to Mimi, he also ended up giving me the information that I was looking for.
He confirmed Susie and Mimi's version of events with me. Anyway, Susie sent this screenshot to Detective Lugo right after Mimi had sent it to her.
This was the big tip they'd been waiting for. But when she got Lugo on the line, he wasn't nearly as energized about this tip as she was.
Lugo said he'd already gotten a tip of his own, and the last thing he wanted was for Victor to catch wind of it and make a run for it. Again, Susie was told to wait, to calm down, to sit back and let the detectives do their jobs.
She'd heard that before. Earlier that morning, Detective Sanchez was in a meeting at the Homicide Bureau.
It was a weekly meeting where he and the other detectives gave status updates on their cases. The phone at my desk rings and I didn't want to be rude.
Somebody was talking. So I let it go to, I let it go to voicemail and got a message.
So after the meeting, I heard it. It was a lady's voice and says, hey, I have some information on a flyer that you guys put out yesterday.
Okay. I haven't been able to speak to this woman, and I haven't heard this voicemail.
Sanchez said it doesn't exist anymore. He and his partner, Lugo, said all messages get automatically deleted after 30 days.
I called the lady back. When I called the lady back, the ringtone was odd.
It wasn't a regular ringtone, it was more of a buzz sound.

And I know that when you call a foreign country, the ringtone is a buzz.

I thought, where's this person calling me from?

Mexico. She was calling from Rosarito, Mexico.

She was an American living in San Diego, and she was visiting a friend at the bar where he worked.

Somehow they saw our flyer and recognized Victor Sosa as one of the employees at that bar. That he had been there for a period of time, and that she last saw him, I think, like the day prior.
I said, okay. Sanchez wrote down the name and location of the bar, and then he forwarded it to the U.S.
Marshals.

They then sent it to the Rosarito Police Department. And then Sanchez sort of forgot about it.
Because the next day, he was at an auto body shop with his daughter when his cell phone rang. Friday morning, which would have been July 2nd.
probably

10

11 a.m. ish, I get a phone call from our office.

I want to transfer a phone call to me, some comandante from some police in Mexico.

Sanchez was about to leave on a family vacation to Mexico of all places.

And like most American workers on the Friday leading into a holiday weekend, his mind was elsewhere.

I said, okay, just transfer him. I didn't know, I didn't know who he was.
I wasn't sure what he was calling about. And he identifies himself as some commandante for the Rosarito Police Department.
That's when it kind of clicked. Oh, man.
And he says, hey, are you looking for Victor Sosa? Yeah. He says, I have him.
The Rosarito Police Department had Victor Sosa. Do you remember how you were feeling when you got this phone call? Kind of like, holy crap.
Holy crap. The murder suspect that had been on the run for months.
The guy Daisy's family had been rallying the internet to find. The so-called shadow.
The Richard Ramirez lookalike. The guy who had been everywhere and nowhere at once.
He'd suddenly fallen right into Sanchez's lap. It's not the first time since I've been here that I've either scheduled a vacation or I've had, like, drop a kid off at college out of state, that I've gotten a call and said, hey, we arrested your guy.
You know, it's like, oh my God, now what? The commandante had Victor transported to the border. There, he was turned over to U.S.
Customs and Border Protection. They located the warrant that sheriffs had filed for his arrest just four days earlier.
That had to have been probably in the afternoon, like 2 o'clock. I got a call from the CBP officer.
I said, hey, we have Victor Sosa in custody. I said, outstanding.
Sanchez arranged to have a detective with the sheriff's fugitive division go on a road trip to one of the busiest border crossings in the world on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

Remember, this is 4th of July weekend.

So anybody driving south,

I mean, what's travel time from here down there

was probably two hours,

which probably took them double that

and then back up.

It meant that Sanchez and his partner, Lugo,

had some time to prepare for their interrogation.

They got suited up. They reviewed the evidence they'd collected, the interviews they'd done.
And they drove over to the East L.A. Sheriff's Station.
Sanchez was filled with anxious energy. He was trying to psych himself up.
He had to figure out what to say and how to get a confession out of an alleged killer. I remember getting ready to go try to interview him thinking

okay what am I going to ask him like how am I going to how am I going to approach this guy so that he could tell me what happened that night right and you kind of kind of pump yourself up like okay how am I going to how am I going to approach him what what's the angles I'm going to hit this guy with.

How did you decide?

What was your approach?

So going to approach him? What's the angles I'm going to hit this guy with? How did you decide? What was your approach? So I didn't want to come in too strong, right? Because I didn't want him to shut down. A lot of it was determined on my first vision of him, right? Because I'd seen some pictures of him.
He looked, obviously he was a lot younger, like, you know, he was in his 20s, early 20s or whatever it was back then. But I didn't want to come too strong to get him to shut down.
I didn't want to come in too weak, say, where he would overrun the, or overtake the interview. But when Victor walked through the door of the sheriff's station, he didn't look like he was going to overtake anything.
When I saw him, he just, he seemed very, well, he looked tired. Like he'd been up all night or something like that.
But he looked, he looked scared. And like, we walked into the interview room and he was, he was sitting in the back of the room.
So we walk into one door, right? He was sitting in, and the room's probably half this size. And he just like looked at us and had that, like, oh man, who are these guys? You show up in a suit, who are these guys to talk to me? Victor looked so terrified that Lugo and Sanchez decided they needed to get him to relax.
We asked one of the station detectives there, hey, can you grab this guy something to eat? Because again, he doesn't know who we are. We're trying to gain some sort of confidence so he could open up to us.
They ended up getting a McDonald's. After that, Lugo and Sanchez decided it was time to ease into the interview.
And there were so many questions to ask. Questions like, what actually happened the night he allegedly met up with Daisy? Why did he go to Mexico? How long had

he been there? And how did he end up working at a spring break style nightclub? So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch.
Dutch provides 24-7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day.
Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.

Rover makes it easy to book pet care whenever you need it. Connect with loving pet sitters in the Rover app today.
Book your first stay on Rover.com or download the app today. Rover, loving pet care in your neighborhood.
Before the detectives could question Victor, they had to read him what's known as the Miranda Warning. It lets the person in custody know they have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
They have a right not to answer questions. They have a right to speak to a lawyer.
And anything they say can be used against them in court. And that's when the interview fell apart, before it even started.
He didn't understand what an attorney was. Now, I don't know if he was playing me, right? You know, when you ask him you have the right to an attorney, you understand, well, what's an attorney? I thought he was playing, like, what are you talking about? You don't know what an attorney is, right? So you could continue the interview, but any questions or any information you gather after that, you're not going to be able to use because a defense attorney is going to throw that out based off of Miranda.
So it was just, I don't want to say it was odd, and I don't know if maybe that was what he was planning all along on his trip to up here. Hey, if they ask me questions, I'm just going to play, you know, like I don't understand.

But it was kind of a downer when he was like, I don't know what an attorney is.

All right. Good luck.

It was, to Sanchez, a huge disappointment.

The one guy that could tell me what happened

didn't.

He just, that was a big letdown.

Victor's bail was set at $2 million.

The booking record from that day states that he had no property with him and no car.

There's nothing listed in the line for an emergency contact. This paperwork also includes a physical description of him, including a description of one of his tattoos, the word karma on his right shoulder.
In the booking photo, his hair is bleached down the middle, just like in that screenshot that Susie had sent to Lugo. And where his gauges had once been were now just a pair of stretched holes in his earlobes.
He looked tired, defeated. It had been a long day, and an even longer four months on the run.
The night that Victor was arrested, Susie went on Facebook and posted a public statement, first in Spanish and then in English. She wrote, February 23rd, my life was brutally destroyed by the murder of my only daughter.
The person responsible was a coward who hid. In the post, Susie thanked her friends, her cousin, and her daughter's best friend.
She thanked Lugo and Sanchez and all the people who called and shared posts on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok.

Thanks to all of you, she wrote, this bastard is behind bars.

The post included a photo of Daisy in her prom dress, her hair glowing bright white.

Susie signed off using a moniker she'd come to use again and again on social media.

Daisy's mom, forever 19.

Three days later, Daisy's friend, her name is Rebecca Fuentes.

She posted a duet with her original TikTok. You know, the one that began, this is my friend Daisy.
And she used it to announce the news. He has been caught.
But this wasn't just a celebration post. It was yet another call to action.
But now we need all the help we can get. We need all of you guys to meet up to get our voices heard.
Location in the comments. The next day, Daisy's mother and about a dozen of Daisy's friends gathered at the location in the comments.
The Compton Courthouse. It's this towering concrete building, and there's this big white sculpture in the shape of a tent in the plaza outside it.
No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! Daisy's friends streamed the whole thing on the Justice for Daisy Instagram page. It was July 6th, the day of Victor's arraignment.
We're on live. We're on live.
Recording live. Yeah.
As comments trickled in on the live stream, Rebecca turned the camera on herself and read them aloud. We're now waiting for the hearing.
It should be anytime soon now. Did you guys see him? No.
All of us are actually going to go in the courtroom and we're going to basically see his face since he did what he did.

I'm praying for you guys. Thank you.

I mean, we're being safe about it. We're being respectful.

They told us we could protest behind the lines that we're doing now and following instructions.

But, you know, we have to see the life sentence.

Remember my friend's name, Daisy Delau. Thank you guys for following along.
We'll keep you guys updated. Feel free if you guys have any questions.
We'll keep you guys updated. At one point, there was this comment that came on the live stream that really seemed to upset Rebecca.
I don't know exactly what it said, but based on her reaction, I assume it was something nasty. Like, have some common sense in you.
We're obviously all hurt. Why would you say that? When the hearing started, Victor was right his charges.
First-degree murder and personal use of a deadly weapon. The murder charge alone carried a possible sentence of 25 years to life.
Victor pleaded not guilty. Susie found it deeply distressing.
When I spoke to her a few months after that day, she told me that he would have avoided so much heartache and so much headache if he would have just pled guilty.

But all right, she said, I guess you just want to make it this much harder on yourself. It also meant that it would be that much harder on Susie.
It meant that this case was going to trial. When the preliminary hearing started in early September, Daisy's mother and her friends all wore white t-shirts printed with a photo of Daisy on them.
As they stood outside the courthouse, Susie gave an interview to the local ABC7 news station. He's a coward.
He knows exactly what he did. He took a part of my soul and I can never get it back until I reunite with her again.
I smile and I go through the notions of life.

But I always have the empty space in me. Always.

I looked up the case on the court's website and started showing up to these hearings.

And it was in the Compton Courthouse that I first introduced myself to Susie.

I told her I'd seen her story on the local news and that I thought there was more to it.

I told her I wanted to know more about her daughter, about the social media campaign, about the investigation. And soon after that was when we met at the Mexican restaurant and she told me everything from the beginning.
About her daughter, her daughter's ex-boyfriend, her daughter's incredible friends, and the way she was still struggling, especially now that she was bracing herself for the trial. She was experiencing a new kind of anxiety and waiting, waiting for the court system, which was moving even slower than normal thanks to COVID.
Victor was being held at Men's Central Jail in downtown LA, and anytime someone in his housing area got sick, it meant he couldn't come to court,

which meant that nobody could come to court. So the dates kept getting pushed back.
But even as the judge and the lawyers met again and again to reschedule, Daisy's mother and her friends kept

showing up. They wanted Victor to see their faces, to know that they were watching, that he wasn't

going to get away with it. It was strange because ever since Daisy's murder, her friends and her

Thank you. their faces, to know that they were watching, that he wasn't going to get away with it.

It was strange because ever since Daisy's murder, her friends and her family had been desperate for any scrap of information about the investigation.

And now they'd have to hear and see everything that had been hidden from them.

Every horrifying detail, every graphic description, crime scene photographs, police camera footage, autopsy illustrations.

In April of the following year, I returned to the Compton Courthouse for the main event, the trial.

Susie and her cousin and a handful of her daughter's friends filled the seats in the gallery.

Sanchez was there too. He sat next to the prosecutor.

The bailiff walked Victor into the courtroom and removed his handcuffs.

His hair was parted and gelled. The bleach had grown out.

He stared straight ahead, emotionless.

Over the next couple of days, I watched as a small army of government workers took the stand, one after the other. There was a DNA analyst, a forensic identification specialist, a coroner criminalist, a medical examiner.
And they were mostly young women. I remember listening to them and feeling totally overwhelmed by this degree of specificity they went into about the most atrocious things.

I thought about how their jobs required them to react to violence, to study its aftermath, to examine its impacts on human skin and bones and organs. They talked about how they swabbed Daisy's body, put the cotton swabs in sterile tubes,

retrieved her tampon, placed her clothing in brown paper bags, a blue zip-up hoodie, a black shirt, a bra, pants, socks, shoes. They talked about collecting items from around her body.
A knife, a pair of black glasses, a yellow and blue beanie, a keychain with a set of keys on it. They told the jury how they rolled up the rug, Wendy's rug, packaged it, took it back to a crime lab and laid it out on butcher paper to dry, then booked it into evidence.
Tested everything for blood, for semen,

for saliva. Found a DNA profile consistent with Victor's on the carpet.
The knife, the keychain,

the tampon. It was hard to argue with the evidence.
But Victor's public defender, A.J. Bain,

found a way. Throughout the trial, he argued that investigators relied too much on DNA.
He argued that they'd introduced errors into their work, that they used outdated software, that they were sloppy with changing their gloves, clumsy with collecting evidence, haphazard with storing it, and that the detectives were lazy, that they failed to ask questions, to find out who the knife belonged to, who the keys belonged to. Detective didn't do a lot of detecting.
They didn't show any of the evidence to any, either for Mr. Sosa or Mr.
Lowe to the family. Hey, is this yours? Is this Sosa's? Is this Mr.
Lowe's? Do these keys fit this door? Does this knife belong to someone? He argued that Victor had nothing to do with Daisy's death. That Daisy lived in an area where robberies were routine, where prostitution was pervasive, and that her murder could have been committed by anyone.
This is a high-crime area. robberies that occur right there.
Not in the area. Right there in that back lot.
What he seemed to be saying was, this is the price of living in Compton. Murders are tragic, but they happen.
And sometimes they're random. I thought about how hard Daisy's mother and her friends had worked

to get attention on this case, to counter this idea that homicide in Compton was normal, that it wasn't worth media attention or police resources. I thought about how this same narrative was now being weaponized by the defense to help convince a jury that Victor was innocent.
The cross-examinations were sometimes brutal to watch.

And not just the ones... convince a jury that Victor was innocent.
The cross-examinations were sometimes brutal to watch.

And not just the ones involving the forensic specialists. I mean, they were professionals

who had taken the stand in lots of other murder trials. It was their job to talk about their work,

even if it was gruesome. But it was the interrogation of Daisy's neighbors that was

really hard to stomach. The people who together made up this portrait of Daisy's community.
There was Jose Tellez, the building manager, Juan de la O, Daisy's grandfather, and Jeffrey, Wendy Valdivia's son. Like, for example, when Jose took the stand, AJ repeatedly asked him if he'd seen Daisy and Victor having sex under a blanket outside the apartment complex.

And it was this line of questioning, I think, that was meant to argue that the two of them were in this loving, consensual relationship.

Basically, that Victor had no motive to kill Daisy.

But each time AJ asked the question, Jose insisted that he didn't see any sexual relations between them. He said through an interpreter, I cannot say that.
I didn't see that. And then AJ just kept asking.
At one point, he even said, you know what a zipper sounds like. Is that correct? Yes, I suppose I do, said Jose.
All right, great. Did you hear a zipper? AJ asked.
Maybe you know where this is headed. and I'll just say that the questioning became more graphic and more upsetting from there.

When Juan took the stand, AJ pointed out that he wasn't wearing his eyeglasses the night he saw this shadowy figure in the window of his apartment.

He said there was no way that Juan could be sure that it was Victor he saw.

At one point later on, AJ told the jury. Do you have Mr.
Dello. I feel bad upon him for us.
But would you want Mr. Magoo, in your case, to make an ID? If you didn't catch that, Victor's public defender referred to Daisy's grandfather as Mr.
Magoo. You know, the cartoon character with comically bad vision.
Even Jeffrey, who was 14 at the time, was questioned about his eyesight, about the fact that he'd walked past Daisy and Victor that same night, but he couldn't make out their faces. He didn't stop to look at them.
He didn't peer at them from out the window. And when he was leader shown the six-pack, the defense attorney pointed out he did not pick the photo of Victor.
But Jeffrey kept his focus. He answered all the questions, and when he didn't understand the questions, he simply said so.
It was unusual to see a child testifying at a murder trial. I mean, according to Lugo, it was almost unheard of.
In Compton, nobody had their child testify. Nobody.
Wendy told me that Jeffrey had insisted on it, that he wasn't scared of retribution, that he knew it was the right thing to do. But the most surprising testimony, it didn't come from Jeffrey.
It didn't come from anyone who lived at the

apartment complex with Daisy, or anyone who examined her body on a medical table. It came

from someone who had only met her a couple of times. And Victor, well, she'd known him his

whole life. She'd given birth to him, and somewhat incredibly, she had agreed to testify against him.

Next time on My Friend Daisy.

I have compassion for the position that she is in, that I am asking her to testify against her son.

And that's not an easy thing to do.

I mean, to think about, think about how terrible that must feel. Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free confidential support.

Call 800-799-7233.

Text START to 88788 or visit thehotline.org.

Your safety matters. Reach out today.

My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with support from Sony Music Entertainment. It's reported, written, and executive produced by me, Jen Swan.
I'm also your host. Our executive producers for London Audio are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh, Bruce Robertson, and Joanna Studebaker.
Our executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producer is Zoe Kolkin.
Production assistance and translations by Miguel Contreras. Sound design, composing, and mixing by Hans Dale Shi.
Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton. Our head of production is Sammy Allison.
And our production manager is Tamika Balance-Kolasny.

Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rosick, and Jamie Myers at Sony,

Ben Goldberg and Orly Greenberg at UTA, and Jen Ortiz at The Cut.