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California


HE BEFRIENDED HIS BROTHER’S MURDERER. IN EACH OTHER, THEY FOUND HEALING

Trino Jimenez visits his brother’s grave at Resurrection Cemetery in Rosemead. A
letter that Jimenez sent the man who murdered him in 1986 developed into a
friendship.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
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By Leila MillerStaff Writer 

Oct. 11, 2021 4 AM PT
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Nearly 29 years had passed when Trino Jimenez decided to write to the man who
murdered his brother, prepared to never hear back.

The killing, in South Los Angeles, had been brutal. Melvin Carroll had struck
Julio Jimenez repeatedly over the head with a bumper jack during a car theft. He
walked away and then panicked, returning to slit Julio Jimenez’s throat with a
broken bottle.

But Jimenez, a devout Christian, was ready to forgive.

“I can never forget him, but I am not consumed about an event that can never be
undone,” he told Carroll in his February 2015 letter. “God loves you and even
the crime of murder is a forgivable offense.”

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Within a few weeks, he received a response, setting the stage for an almost
unthinkable friendship. It challenges the notion that, for the most egregious
cases, victims and those who have caused harm should always be kept apart.

California

Behind the story: Dialogues between prisoners and those they have harmed

A little-known California prison program facilitates dialogues between prisoners
and victims. Some have turned into friendships.

Oct. 11, 2021

The relationship would change each man, launching them on respective journeys of
forgiveness and remorse — a journey Jimenez has largely taken without other
members of his family.

They would ultimately meet through a little-known state program that brings
prisoners together with survivors and families of victims and which advocates
say has the potential to help far more people heal from trauma.

::

Julio Jimenez, who was brutally murdered in Los Angeles in 1986.
(Jimenez family)

Julio Jimenez, the eldest of four brothers, grew up in a Mexican family in
Huntington Park. By age 24, he was working in a South L.A. warehouse supporting
a 4-year-old son and a baby boy.

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He enjoyed fatherhood and life’s simple pleasures, like driving his prized blue
Chevy Monte Carlo around town. But like some of his friends, he frequently used
PCP, a drug known as angel dust. He’d buy PCP-dipped cigarettes from Carroll, a
man close to his age who had spent the previous several years in prison for
robbery and grand theft auto.

On Feb. 27, 1986, Carroll, along with two other men, decided to steal Julio
Jimenez’s car. After the two men hot-wired the car and began driving away,
Carroll told Julio Jimenez that it had been stolen. He invited him into his own
car, pretending to help him find the Chevy.

They got out at South L.A.’s Slauson Park. Julio Jimenez grew suspicious and
accused Carroll of being involved. Carroll denied it, then hit him when his back
was turned, bashing his head 17 times.

His body was found by two people at 1:45 a.m. with a pocket turned inside out.
Almost two years later, Carroll was sentenced to 26 years to life.

::

Trino Jimenez was 18 when his brother died, but much of that year is blacked out
in his memory. He began to distrust Black people — Carroll is Black — and
briefly turned to alcohol to numb the pain.

“I was very damaged,” he said. “I actually wanted to hold the entire Black race
accountable for him.”

The death was too painful for the Jimenez family to talk about. Jimenez would go
on to raise a son and two daughters, work for 30 years for a roofing
manufacturer and travel overseas for missionary work.

A flower lies on the asphalt at Resurrection Cemetery in Rosemead, where Trino
Jimenez was delivering flowers. Jimenez would place the flower on his brother’s
grave.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

But two encounters over the years with people convicted of heinous crimes made
him reflect on forgiveness and one’s capacity to change. He met a cousin who had
served time for murder and seemed to have transformed his life, and he later
testified as a character witness for a murderer who had been part of his
church’s bible study.

Jimenez eventually sought to contact Carroll. In 2014, a former prisoner he met
through his church found Carroll’s prison identification number and told Jimenez
he could request a transcript of Carroll’s parole hearing.

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It was then that he learned that Carroll had taken a life in his early teens,
when he was confronted by a woman inside a home he was burglarizing and hit her
over the head with a glass jar.

Carroll spent about 18 months at a juvenile facility in Texas before moving to
California, where his life continued to spiral downward as he was arrested for
robberies.

Jimenez was troubled but began to see Carroll with “much deeper understanding
and compassion.”

::

At a prison in Vacaville, Carroll recognized the last name on the letter and
expected hate mail.

Instead, he could barely believe what it said.

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.

More stories

“After this occurrence, I faced many struggles, my heart was filled with anger
and not only an anger towards the people responsible, but towards an entire
race,” Jimenez wrote. “God had to help me with my struggles, with my anger,
eventually He carved out this anger from me.”

A friend told him Jimenez sounded sincere, so Carroll sent him a typed response.
He was overwhelmed that Jimenez had strong faith in God despite losing his
brother and told him that “through your letter God has restored me.”

Melvin Carroll was granted parole in 2019 with the support of Julio Jimenez’s
brother, Trino Jimenez.
(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

He had come “to understand that I must take responsibility for every one’s life
that I destroyed on 02/28/1986,” he wrote.

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When Jimenez got the letter, he cried as if he had just lost his brother. He
realized Carroll was not the only one who still needed healing.

In his next letter, he asked Carroll why he had killed his brother so violently.
Did he owe him money? Do him wrong? Or was it just to rob him?

Carroll replied that Julio Jimenez “did nothing to deserve death,” but had been
a victim of his “predator type life-style, and a criminal way of thinking.”

The exchanges continued steadily and grew more intimate. Jimenez sent Carroll a
copy of his brother’s death certificate and disclosed that he, himself, was
named after his grandfather who died in prison while serving a murder sentence.
Carroll revealed he had been denied parole again.

Jimenez’s letters touched others. Carroll told him that they had almost created
a Bible study circle in his building as inmates tried to understand the
Scriptures that he sent, often on God’s forgiveness of sin.

As they corresponded, Carroll said in an interview, he began to truly feel the
pain he had caused the Jimenez family. After so many years of hurting people, he
said, “remorse wasn’t part of my lifestyle.”

Trino Jimenez, at his home in Whittier, holds the letter he sent to Melvin
Carroll.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

“I started feeling it, and it hurt, it freaking hurt, because I never thought
about remorse. Never. All I thought about was the time that I had to do,” he
said.

::

California’s prison system began hosting meetings between victims and inmates in
the 1990s. Victim-offender dialogues, as they are known, are a hallmark of
restorative justice, an approach that emphasizes repairing harm through dialogue
and accountability. It’s attentive to how prisoners have also often experienced
trauma.

Over the last few decades, the practice has grown across the country, partly due
to a public shift toward rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration,
according to Thalia González, a professor at Occidental College who has studied
the dialogues nationwide.

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In California, only survivors and next-of-kin of victims can initiate a dialogue
by reaching out to the prison system’s Office of Victim and Survivor Rights and
Services. If an inmate agrees and passes a screening, a trained facilitator
separately prepares both parties. The process can take months, and the
facilitator may work with the prisoner on taking accountability, as well as
feelings of guilt and shame.

The meeting is not documented in the prisoner’s main file to ensure it has no
impact on their status in the corrections system. Some victims participate in
secret because their family may not approve.

“For people who are survivors, there might have been a trial or plea bargain but
those don’t necessarily give you the truth,” said Rebecca Weiker, a dialogue
facilitator.

“They might have questions only that person can answer. They might want to know
if the person is sorry, if they understand the impact that happened. Just
knowing that they understood the harm, they understood the impact, is incredibly
powerful.”

> “. . . remorse wasn’t part of my lifestyle. I started feeling it, and it hurt,
> it freaking hurt, because I never thought about remorse. Never. All I thought
> about was the time that I had to do.”

Melvin Carroll, convicted of the 1986 murder of Julio Jimenez



Melvin Carroll and Trino Jimenez began corresponding in 2015 and met in 2017
through a state program that brings victims and prisoners together in dialogue.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

But the dialogue program is not well-known or widely used. There have been only
58 first-time dialogues from 2011-21 and at least 192 requests since 2017,
according to the prison system. (A few pairs have met multiple times.)

Mike Young, an assistant chief in the office of victim services, estimated only
about 30% of requests end up in a dialogue, sometimes because the prison doesn’t
think one side is ready. He said that they weren’t advertised heavily in recent
years because of concerns about whether officials could support a large influx
of requests. With the encouragement of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the prison system
awarded grants in 2019 to several community groups with trained facilitators.

Young hopes that a new apology-letter program, where victims will have the
opportunity to accept letters from prisoners, will also lead to more dialogues.

“The fact that a victim wants to go into prison to face their offender is
extremely rare,” he said. “But the fact that it’s extremely rare should not mean
they shouldn’t have that opportunity.”

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::

The idea of meeting the Jimenez family was nerve-racking for Carroll.

Although two facilitators spent months preparing him for the dialogue, he paced
the prison yard the night before, trying to collect his thoughts. The next
morning, he thought to himself, “if nothing else, I was just going to go through
that meeting.”

“I had come to terms with what I had did,” he said. “The next thing is when
someone reaches out to you and tries to get closure, and you are the only one
that can give it to him.”

The two facilitators, a support person for Jimenez, Carroll and Jimenez met in
the visitor’s center of the Vacaville prison on a weekday in March 2017. A guard
in the room sat out of hearing range.

Jimenez’s eyes locked on Carroll as he began to walk toward them. Carroll was
shaking.

Before they started, Jimenez took Carroll’s hands in both of his. He prayed that
the same hands that had picked up the bumper jack “would be the instrument of
love now.”

He showed Carroll pictures of his family, including his brother’s children, to
convey that his life had managed to move past the crime. He also brought a
photograph of his brothers by Julio Jimenez’s grave.

Carroll was moved to tears.

“I didn’t understand it,” he said. “The man started sharing, and for me and the
life that I lived, it was unusual.”

Carroll told Jimenez he thought the murder could be traced to an incident he
witnessed as a child. A white law enforcement officer had slapped his
grandmother after pulling her over, he said.

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She had begged him to not tell his grandfather, so he kept it to himself. But
from then on, Carroll said, he began to harbor hate for other races. Every time
he was released from prison or jail, he “came out worse.”

“It wasn’t violence, it was extreme violence,” he said of killing Julio Jimenez.
“None of it was necessary, but that’s what my frame of mind was.”

After six hours of talking, the two men embraced. Carroll was later smiling so
hard that he was asked if he had been found suitable for parole.

“Being forgiven for the hurt you caused a family, that took so much weight off
my shoulders, like I was soaring on my way back,” he said. “They said, ‘You got
found suitable?’ I said, ‘Hey, I got something better than that.’”

::

In December 2019, Jimenez attended Carroll’s parole hearing at the Sierra
Conservation Center prison in Tuolumne County.

He said that although he could not deny the pain Carroll had caused, Carroll had
apologized not only in the first letter, but also in subsequent ones. Jimenez
told commissioners his relationship with Carroll led him to become an advocate
for restorative justice, work that included going back into prison to share
their story with other inmates.

“I myself have been given a chance to — to further heal, and all of that started
because Mr. Carroll said yes to me,” he said.

The commissioners granted Carroll parole, saying that Jimenez’s statement had
helped them consider his ability to see the impact of his crime.

But grief is complicated. When Jimenez learned of Carroll’s release, he was hit
with guilt. He thought about his two other brothers, who he sensed were not
quite as ready to forgive and had opted to not attend Carroll’s parole hearings.
He has not shown them his correspondence with Carroll.

“I asked myself if I was contributing to my brothers’ pain,” he said.

Advertisement




::

Today, Carroll, 61, works helping the homeless in Northern California and says
he wants to “live my life, or what I have left, in peace.”

The two men have each other’s phone numbers and check in occasionally. They’re
protective of each other, and their relationship is one where if Jimenez asks
something of him, Carroll feels he should honor it.

“I owe that man everything,” he said. “He helped me get my freedom, and that was
the most important thing to me at the time because I didn’t want to die in
prison. How can you not admire someone like that?”

But Jimenez, 53, has been careful about how he’s spoken about Carroll to his
family. In 2018, he decided it was time to “rope in” another family member and
asked Carroll to write his mother a letter.

Thinking about his brother still quickly brings his mother, Maria Jimenez, to
tears. Sitting in Trino Jimenez’s home, where she lives, she hugged a large
photograph of Julio Jimenez as a child to her chest and could barely speak when
asked about her son.

Between deep breaths, she recalled how the night Julio was killed she had stayed
up waiting for him to return home. After a detective showed up the next morning,
she had searched for her husband to tell him the news.

She said that she doesn’t hold malice against Carroll anymore and that God
should bless him. While she described crying when she read the apology letter
that Carroll sent her, she grew quiet when asked whether it had made a
difference.

“It was well written,” she said. “But the pain is there.”

::

Trino Jimenez delivers flowers for a funeral service at Resurrection Cemetery in
Rosemead.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Jimenez works part time for a mortuary, and on a recent Friday, he set up heavy
flower arrangements around a burial plot at the Resurrection Cemetery in
Rosemead.

Advertisement


He then drove up a hill to Julio Jimenez’s grave, dusting off the marker and
setting down three pink roses.

At the gravesite, he often reflects on how his brother’s memory has become
stronger since he met Carroll. He’s even considered bringing Carroll there one
day.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CaliforniaColumn One
Leila Miller

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Leila Miller is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the
newspaper in 2018, she was a reporting fellow at PBS’s “Frontline.” Originally
from Los Angeles, Miller is a graduate of Oberlin College and Columbia
University’s School of Journalism. She is fluent in Spanish.

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