$8.5 Million for Family of Murdered Elderly Californian Detained for Cold Case Killings Based on “Genetic Genealogy”
by Chuck Sharman
Under an agreement signed on September 17, 2025, California’s Ventura County agreed to pay $8.5 million to Patricia and Anthony Garcia, the wife and son of Tony Garcia, 70, who was murdered by a fellow detainee at the County’s Todd Road Jail (TRJ) in November 2024. The fatal attack was the fourth that Garcia suffered while awaiting trial at the lockup for a pair of decades-old killings linked to him by a controversial type of DNA identification.
Those murder cases had long gone cold when they were linked to Garcia in 2023 using “genetic genealogy,” a process that searches the DNA in government and commercial databases and compares it to DNA extracted from evidence collected after unsolved crimes, like the killings of Rachel Zendejas, 20, in January 1981 and Lisa Gondek, 21, in December of that year. Rather than identifying a match of the entire genome, it matches components to build a sort of family tree, pointing to a possible group of suspects. One 2018 study reported in the University of Chicago Law Review found that the process had only a 60% success rate in identifying third cousins or closer relatives to a test sample using the commercial database, GEDmatch.
Nevertheless, investigators claimed that genetic genealogy identified Garcia as the killer of the two women, and he was booked into TRJ in February 2023. Within two months, he was injured when a cellmate shoved him against a door. A few weeks after that, in early May, a new cellmate assaulted him while he slept, sending him to the hospital with stab wounds to his face and neck. For that Richard Pulido, 32, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 14 years to life in prison, the Ventura County Star reported.
Garcia was violently attacked a third time in November 2023, by another cellmate who punched him in the head and neck, hospitalizing him again with “traumatic brain injury, left orbital fracture, nose fracture, right clavicle fracture, subdural hematoma, two brain bleeds, and severe lacerations,” the complaint recalled.
A County judge then ordered Garcia separated from other detainees in March 2024. But he wasn’t. Another cellmate attacked him in April 2024, and he died of his injuries seven months later. The County coroner ruled the death a homicide, but the office of County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko declined to file charges.
With the aid of attorneys Dale K. Galipo and Benjamin S. Levine of the Law Offices of Dale K. Galipo in Woodland Hills, as well as Brandon Sua of Sua Law Group APC in Simi Valley, Garcia’s wife and son filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in July 2025. Proceeding under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, they accused the County and its TRJ staffers of failure to protect Garcia and other violations of his Fourteenth Amendment rights, along with state-law claims for negligence and wrongful death. The parties then proceeded to reach their settlement agreement, with a payout to Plaintiffs that included costs and fees for their attorneys. See: Garcia v. Cty. of Ventura, USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 2:25-cv-06698.
The office of County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff declined to tell the Ventura County Star whether the settlement prompted any policy changes. Spokesperson Sgt. Monica Smith also wouldn’t say whether additional security measures were put in place. But Senior Deputy District Attorney Richard Simon remained convinced that Garcia died guilty of the two murders he was charged with. “What happened to him in custody doesn’t change who he was or what he did,” Simon told the Ventura County Star.
Genetic genealogy was most famously used to find the Golden State Killer by predicting that he was blue-eyed and bald. That led investigators to Joseph DeAngelo, Jr., who confessed to a series of rapes and murders and was sentenced to life in prison in 2018. After the death of Garcia, who had not confessed to any killings, prosecutors and investigators refused a request from the Los Angeles Times to share the specific DNA evidence that they had against him.
Additional sources: Los Angeles Times, University of Chicago Law Review, Ventura County Star
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login
Related legal case
Garcia v. Cty. of Ventura
| Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 2:25-cv-06698 |
| Level | District Court |