The first to be killed on the weekend of Dec. 20 was 17-year-old Erik Sainz, who was shot in the driveway of a West Puente Valley home that Friday afternoon. Then came Matthew Albert Garcia, 26, who was found dead on the sidewalk in Rosemead about an hour before sunrise on Saturday.
Before the weekend ended, two more people — a 37-year-old man and a 16-year-old youth — would be shot to death.
What each victim that weekend had in common was ethnicity.
The average Latino homicide victim in Los Angeles County is 15% more likely to be killed on a weekend — defined here as Friday, Saturday or Sunday — than victims of other races or ethnicities, according to a Times analysis of the more than 13,000 Los Angeles County homicides recorded from 2000 to 2014 in the Homicide Report.