When Amelia Salehpour walked away from an Orange County drug treatment facility, her parents turned to the police for help. She was in danger \u2014 they were sure of it.<\/p>\n
The 18-year-old checked herself out of Saddleback Recovery in Costa Mesa on a summer day in 2023, and hopped into a car with her ex-boyfriend and a man he called \u201cRaider.\u201d Together, they drove up to the San Fernando Valley.<\/p>\n
After tracking his daughter down to what a prosecutor later called a \u201chouse of horrors\u201d in Van Nuys, Ali Salehpour decided to call 911. Amelia, he said, struggled with mental illness and had the cognitive abilities of an eighth-grader, which made her vulnerable to manipulation. Her family pleaded for officers to come check on her.<\/p>\n
The first cops arrived hours later. They knocked on a side gate and left after getting no response.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Undated handout photo of Amelia Salehpour who died in 2023 at age 18.<\/p>\n
(Courtesy of Salehpour family)<\/p>\n
The next day, after more prodding by Amelia\u2019s father, police received permission to search some parts of the house but found no sign of her. Then, less than 24 hours later, someone inside the house called police to report a death. Officers found Amelia in a garage, next to syringes and a burned spoon with a sticky black substance.<\/p>\n
The first LAPD investigators on scene ruled it an open-and-shut case of accidental overdose. The medical examiner\u2019s office agreed, deciding against a more thorough autopsy.<\/p>\n
But the family was unconvinced. <\/p>\n
They hired a high-end investigative firm that said it uncovered evidence that Amelia was being groomed for sex work and that her death had only been made look like an overdose. A private autopsy paid for by the family found signs of strangulation.<\/p>\n
The contradictory findings have since triggered a bitter conflict within local law enforcement. On one side are LAPD homicide detectives and some within the L.A. County district attorney\u2019s office who maintain the original ruling of an overdose was correct. <\/p>\n
Salehpour and his wife, Sue, maintain she was killed \u2014 and they are not alone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ali Salehpour reviews forensic examination evidence in the death of his daughter Amelia Salehpour. He and his wife are suing the city of L.A., alleging that LAPD officers botched or ignored numerous opportunities to save their daughter\u2019s life. <\/p>\n
(Al Seib \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, a deputy district attorney filed criminal charges \u2014 which have since been dropped \u2014 against seven people based on evidence gathered by the family\u2019s investigators and a pair of LAPD narcotics detectives.<\/p>\n
Defense attorneys for the suspects have accused the Salehpours of being a rich family so blinded by the grief at losing their young daughter that they effectively bought a prosecution.<\/p>\n
Amelia\u2019s father is retired after helping build Applied Materials Inc., the country\u2019s biggest supplier of equipment used to make microchips, into the $6-billion company that it is today. <\/p>\n
Her parents said they are only doing what any parent would do in search of justice for their child \u2014 if they had the money. <\/p>\n
Ali Salehpour said his goal from the family\u2019s litigation is not a payout from the city. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not in this for the money,\u201d he said. \u201cI need [the LAPD] to do its job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sue Salehpour\u2019s voice still cracks and her eyes become watery when she talks about what happened to her daughter. Instead of admitting to their mishandling of the family\u2019s initial pleas for help, the Police Department closed ranks and fought them at every step, she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe LAPD let our daughter down, they let our daughter die in that house,\u201d she said. \u201cThey made the decision that our daughter was a drug addict and mentally ill and they treated her that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A family photo of Amelia Salehpour with her mother, Sue.<\/p>\n
(Al Seib \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
From an early age growing up in the Bay Area city of Saratoga, Amelia was always the center of attention \u2014 \u201cexuberant, silly, joyful,\u201d her mother recalled. Her parents started calling her their \u201csupernova.\u201d <\/p>\n
They sought to nurture Amelia\u2019s talents by putting her in piano, violin and singing lessons.<\/p>\n
Dark-haired, with piercing eyes, Amelia tried to maintain a normal teenage life. When she wasn\u2019t glued to her phone, she was rifling through the racks at thrift stores or ordering Hello Kitty memorabilia online. On one birthday, her father surprised her by flying her down to L.A. to see her favorite band, emo rockers My Chemical Romance, at SoFi Stadium.<\/p>\n
But underneath her bright smile, she struggled with a range of medical and mental health issues, her parents said. <\/p>\n
In her early teens, her parents say, she began showing signs of borderline personality disorder, attention deficit disorder and depression. The symptoms worsened as she dealt with the loss of a cousin and both of her grandmothers in the span of a few years. <\/p>\n
She tried to take her own life several times, and after one attempt, in 2019, her family says she was committed to a mental health facility. Soon, she began using drugs to self-medicate, keeping her parents in a state of constant worry. Desperate for a solution, they checked her into Rising Roads Recovery, a $30,000-a-month, women-only in-patient mental health treatment center.<\/p>\n
A few months before her death, Amelia\u2019s parents dropped her off at the clinic in Costa Mesa. In the weeks that followed, they allege in a lawsuit against Rising Roads filed in L.A. County Superior Court, the staff repeatedly misled them about Amelia\u2019s worsening condition. <\/p>\n
Cut off from her family and friends, she began suffering panic attacks after being sexually assaulted by another patient, the family\u2019s lawsuit says. They claim Amelia confided in staff members that she heard nightly voices in her head suggesting she kill herself or harm others. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ali and Sue Salehpour say they spent more than $1 million on private investigators to get to the bottom of what happened to their daughter.<\/p>\n
(Al Seib \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
The Salehpours contend they were kept in the dark when Amelia was transferred to a sister facility for substance abuse, Saddleback, after she was caught with a vape pen.<\/p>\n
Despite her ongoing struggles, the family\u2019s lawsuit says that Saddleback staff allowed Amelia to check herself out of the facility on July 22, 2023. Around 3:49 p.m. that day, she walked out with a suitcase of clothes, five weeks\u2019 worth of medication \u2014 and no cellphone or ID.<\/p>\n
Surveillance video showed her getting into a car and driving off, the family\u2019s lawsuit says.<\/p>\n
An attorney for Rising Roads responded to an inquiry about Amelia\u2019s case with a statement that said the center was \u201cdeeply saddened by her passing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are tragic and profoundly unfortunate circumstances. Rising Roads denies the allegations made against it and its staff, and maintains that its team acted professionally and in full compliance with all applicable standards, policies, and legal obligations,\u201d said Brian Hoffman, declining to comment further.<\/p>\n
Saddleback said it generally denied the allegations made in the Salehpours\u2019 suit.<\/p>\n
After learning that she may have been taken to the Van Nuys area, Amelia\u2019s uncle, Armin, drove around for hours before spotting her outside a liquor store off Sepulveda Boulevard, which police say is a known hub for sex work.<\/p>\n
Amelia got into his car and they cruised around for a while, talking. He tried without success to convince her to go with him back down to San Pedro, where her grandmother lived. Eventually she asked him to drop her off at a run-down house with a tall white fence at 15235 Runnymede St. <\/p>\n
They agreed to meet the following day so that he could buy her a new cellphone. They took a selfie together, and Amelia turned to wave as she walked through the front door, her uncle testified at a preliminary hearing earlier this year.<\/p>\n
When she didn\u2019t show up for their meeting the next day, her parents feared the worst. <\/p>\n
Although the perception lingers that violent crime is rampant in Los Angeles, statistically speaking murder is less common that it has been in decades. Yet even with fewer killings to investigate, homicide \u201cclearance rates,\u201d a measure of how often cases are solved by police, remain steady.<\/p>\n
Cases become cold. Witnesses refuse to step forward. Killers cover their tracks.<\/p>\n
In rare cases, slayings go undetected by authorities or are misclassified. Unlike others who have lost loved ones under circumstances that are unclear or in dispute, the Salehpours had the resources to ensure no stone was left unturned.<\/p>\n
After Amelia failed to show up for the meeting with her uncle, the family contacted Black Box, a private security company. The firm, whose founder Edan Yemini once served as a personal security guard for Britney Spears, employs former military specialists from the U.S. and Israel to serve as armed bodyguards.<\/p>\n
Black Box\u2019s director of investigations, John Romero, a retired LAPD captain, called 911 on the family\u2019s behalf. <\/p>\n
The Salehpours have paid the company more than $1 million over three years, according to testimony in court and filings by attorneys for some of the defendants. They also hired a pair of high-powered civil lawyers, Alan Jackson, a former L.A. County prosecutor, and Caleb Mason, a former federal prosecutor in San Diego, to handle their lawsuits.<\/p>\n
Officers showed up and left after Romero\u2019s 911 call, but Black Box agents kept up round-the-clock surveillance of the house. They saw people going in and out, carrying boxes out of the house onto a flatbed truck as though they were \u201csanitizing a crime scene,\u201d the family\u2019s lawsuit says. <\/p>\n
Amelia\u2019s father, who had flown down from Northern California, kept watch overnight outside from the back of his rental car. <\/p>\n
Crucially, the family\u2019s lawsuit claims, the police who arrived the following afternoon and got permission to look around did only a partial search of the house, failing to look inside a garage on the property after one of the residents asked them not to disturb a person who was sleeping. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s where Amelia was discovered the next day.<\/p>\n
While the rest of the house was in disarray, the room where she was found was almost spotless. Her family told The Times that the scene \u2014 her body splayed on the floor next to an open drawer with needles and a burned spoon with black tar heroin residue \u2014 was so neatly arranged that to them it looked staged. <\/p>\n
An investigator from the Los Angeles Medical Examiner\u2019s office put her time of death at between 16 and 24 hours before the body was found \u2014 meaning she was likely still alive when LAPD officers were at the house the day before, the family\u2019s lawsuit says.<\/p>\n
But because no foul play was suspected, authorities were slow to collect and process key evidence at the scene, the family argued.<\/p>\n
The private autopsy the family commissioned found other DNA on Amelia\u2019s underwear and under her fingernails, as well as evidence of \u201csevere sexual trauma.\u201d <\/p>\n
Unlike the medical examiner\u2019s assessment \u2014 which found signs of \u201clividity,\u201d a medical name for the pooling of blood that occurs if a body is moved after someone has died \u2014 the private exam theorized it was bruising from places where Amelia was struck with a blunt object while still alive. <\/p>\n
Authorities later arranged for a cadaver dog to search the Runnymede house, which indicated the presence of human remains in the garage where Amelia\u2019s body was found, as well as an adjacent shed. Inside, investigators discovered a fan belt hanging from the ceiling. <\/p>\n
Suspecting Amelia may have been bound or strangled there, the family also sought out Dr. William Smock, a forensic medicine expert with the Louisville (Ky.) Police Department. Smock had testified as an expert on strangulation as a witness for the prosecution in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. <\/p>\n
His conclusion, according to records provided by the family: Amelia had died a violent death. <\/p>\n
In the meantime, Black Box\u2019s investigation had started to resemble a full-fledged homicide case. Its investigators, some of whom are former homicide detectives, started running the plates of vehicles that were photographed coming and going from the house. They pulled together profiles of the house\u2019s occupants using information available from data brokers \u2014 building a history of the home that was so detailed that Black Box could tell \u201cwho\u2019s received pizza there,\u201d Romero told The Times. <\/p>\n
The family\u2019s probe began to focus on the man nicknamed \u201cRaider\u201d who accompanied Amelia and her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Reyes, to the Valley the day she left the treatment center. His name was Marlon Mancillas, and an LAPD detective testified in court that he was a reputed Blythe Street gang member with a lengthy criminal past that included a 2019 conviction for aiding a murder suspect\u2019s efforts to elude capture.<\/p>\n
Black Box visited Mancillas in jail, where he was locked up on auto theft charges, and he agreed to speak to them in exchange for money. That Christmas, they put about $1,000 on his books. <\/p>\n
Nubia Diaz, an attorney for Mancillas, said her client \u201chas always maintained his innocence.\u201d <\/p>\n
In an interview with another resident of the Runnymede house, the private investigators said they learned something that the Salehpours had long feared: that the police\u2019s visit on July 24 had so panicked the occupants of the home. that \u201cAmelia became a liability and they decided to kill her,\u201d the family said in its lawsuit against the LAPD.<\/p>\n
The family went back to the authorities with their new evidence.<\/p>\n
But rather than revisit the initial findings, the lawsuit filed by the Salehpours claims, the LAPD\u2019s Valley homicide unit and the medical examiner\u2019s office closed ranks and refused to budge.<\/p>\n
Unbeknown to the Salehpours and Black Box, a pair of LAPD narcotics detectives, Alexander Tan and Jose Verdin, were also investigating the Runnymede house for drug trafficking.<\/p>\n
Tan and Verdin arrested the ex-wife of one of the home\u2019s residents and brought her in for questioning, hoping that she would help them break the case, according to court testimony. The woman, who was on parole, offered to give police information about the Runnymede house. She asked them if they knew about a \u201cdead girl.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neither detective knew what she was talking about.<\/p>\n
Verdin testified at a preliminary hearing earlier this year that he first learned of the family\u2019s investigation a few months into his own probe of the Runnymede address \u2014 a known \u201cflop house\u201d where police had received more than 300 calls for service since 2017. Weeks before Amelia\u2019s death, officers had responded there for a report of a man beating a woman with an aluminum bat.<\/p>\n
The home was outfitted with a security system that allowed its occupants to monitor the home\u2019s exterior, and young women were seen coming and going throughout the day, suggesting the possibility that they were trafficked, testified Verdin, a 30-year LAPD veteran who ran the Van Nuys drug squad. When police served a search warrant on the house in February, they found 26 assault-style rifles in one of the bedrooms, he said. <\/p>\n
Verdin contended in a whistleblower government claim against the city that as he began to unearth evidence suggesting Amelia may have been killed, LAPD higher-ups set out to \u201csystematically\u201d dismantle the case. His claim says the department took the extraordinary step of requiring its own detectives to obtain a court order to get access to certain body camera footage.<\/p>\n
The city has not yet responded to the detective\u2019s claim, which is usually a precursor to a lawsuit.<\/p>\n
At a meeting on Sept. 12 with his higher-ups, Verdin said in his claim that he suggested the case be turned over to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. Instead, his claim alleges, he was told to \u201cleave it alone.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not helping the family sue us,\u201d Verdin claims an LAPD official said. <\/p>\n
Then, Verdin said his bosses moved his partner Tan out of narcotics without notice. And while Tan was assured that he would be given time to continue working on the case, he was soon buried with new assignments, according to Verdin\u2019s claim.<\/p>\n
The narcotics detectives had been in communication with Ranna Jahanshahi, a prosecutor in the L.A. County district attorney\u2019s office. She found the evidence compelling enough to pursue charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment among others against seven defendants, including Amelia\u2019s ex-boyfriend Reyes and the man he was driving with, Mancillas, aka \u201cRaider.\u201d <\/p>\n
All of the defendants pleaded not guilty.<\/p>\n
Dyke Huish, an attorney for Reyes, said his client faced charges even though he only dropped Amelia off in the Valley.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is ultimately about a young girl that passed away tragically, and parents who could not accept the reality of drug overdoses and hard living by a girl who had serious drug addictions,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m certain that they loved their daughter very much, but rather than accept the reality, they attempted to force it into a narrative that better suited what they wanted to believe about their daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jahanshahi declined to comment in response to an inquiry from The Times. In an email to leadership at the D.A.\u2019s office, she described facing resistance from colleagues along with police and medical examiners officials with whom she normally worked closely. <\/p>\n
As she clashed with some in her office over the prosecution, her original co-counsel was suddenly reassigned. His replacement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Engell, privately expressed his misgivings about the cases both to colleagues and defense attorneys. <\/p>\n
At a hearing in mid-September, Jahanshahi lashed out at Engell in open court, accusing him of \u201cgoing behind her back\u201d and conspiring to get her removed from the case.<\/p>\n
In her email to leaders at the D.A.\u2019s office, Jahanshahi wrote that she had been dealing with the mental toll of fighting for justice while being constantly undermined. \u201cI cannot take any more spoken or silently whispered backstabbing and bludgeoning of my character and identity,\u201d she wrote in the message late last month. <\/p>\n
Lawyers for the seven defendants have seized on the inter-office discord. <\/p>\n
In a motion to remove Jahanshahi from the case, one defense attorney described her as a \u201crogue prosecutor\u201d who had gotten emotionally entangled with the Salehpours and was leaking them discovery evidence to use in their civil case.<\/p>\n
During a court hearing in downtown L.A. on Sept. 25, Superior Court Judge Charlene Olmedo said that she wouldn\u2019t tolerate any game-playing by either side.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on in your office, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on in LAPD. I don\u2019t know what is going on with this case,\u201d a visibly frustrated Olmedo said to Jahanshahi.<\/p>\n
Then, in late October, charges against all seven defendants were dropped with no public explanation from the D.A.\u2019s office. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, foreground, speaks at a news conference in 2024.<\/p>\n
(Genaro Molina \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Mancillas\u2019 attorney called the decision to dismiss the charges \u201cthe right one.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe evidence did not support the allegations against my client,\u201d Diaz said. \u201cWe are grateful that the legal process ultimately reflected that.\u201d<\/p>\n
LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, who oversaw the department\u2019s Valley Bureau at the time of Amelia\u2019s death, said that he was \u201cmore familiar with the case than I care to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have to tell you: Money and influence equals power,\u201d he said in an interview before the charges were dismissed, adding he was limited in what he could say to avoid compromising what remained an ongoing criminal investigation.<\/p>\n
The Salehpours told The Times they were invited to a meeting last week with Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and nearly two dozen senior members of his office, where Hochman told them that he believed that their daughter had been killed. But in order to pursue a murder case at this juncture, they said Hochman told them, it would be necessary to first drop the kidnapping and false imprisonment charges and continue to investigate further. <\/p>\n
Keeping the lesser charges in place risked running afoul of state laws that forbid \u201cdouble jeopardy\u201d or prosecuting a defendant twice for the same alleged crime, the Salehpours said the D.A. explained.<\/p>\n
Reluctantly, the Salehpours said, they accepted the decision to drop the charges.<\/p>\n
According to the Salehpours, Hochman said he couldn\u2019t make promises about any future charges but assured them that the case would be investigated by the major crimes unit, which handles the D.A.\u2019s highest-profile and complex homicide cases. He also assured them that he would call LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell to ensure that their respective agencies were on the same page.<\/p>\n
For Ali Salehpour, it felt somewhat vindicating to hear those words. Yet years of fighting to get police and prosecutors to take his claims seriously made him leery.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if he did that just to appease us. That\u2019s my biggest fear,\u201d Salehpour said. \u201cDid he just say that to make us happy, and to shut us up?\u201d<\/p>\n
Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Amelia Salehpour walked away from an Orange County drug treatment facility, her parents turned to the police…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[39155,39160,9342,339,1431,6314,9172,48,52,51,1846,47,50,49,39158,236,39159,39157,7245,39156,72],"class_list":["post-65409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-amelia-salehpour","tag-black-box","tag-daughter","tag-death","tag-family","tag-father","tag-house","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lawsuit","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-open-and-shut-case","tag-police","tag-roads-recovery","tag-salehpours","tag-uncle","tag-wealthy-parent","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}