The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to review the case of a Torrance man who pleaded no contest in the midst of his trial to raping and murdering a teenage girl and a young woman about eight months apart in 2011.
Geovanni Borjas, now 40, pleaded no contest in October 2022 to two counts each of first-degree murder and forcible rape, along with a single count of kidnapping to commit rape, after repeatedly losing bids to replace his attorney or represent himself. He also admitted the special circumstance allegations of multiple murders and murder during the commission of a rape.
The case stemmed from the April 24, 2011, killing of 17-year-old Michelle Lozano and the Dec. 26, 2011, slaying of Bree’Anna Guzman, 22. Both victims had been sexually assaulted.
Lozano’s body was found at about 11:40 p.m. April 25, 2011, alongside the Golden State (5) Freeway near State Street in Boyle Heights. Police said the body had been wrapped in plastic bags, put in a plastic container and dumped over a masonry barrier along the freeway, and that the container broke open when it hit the ground.
Guzman’s partially clothed body was discovered Jan. 26, 2012, near the Riverside Drive on-ramp to the southbound Glendale (2) Freeway in the Silver Lake area. Police said the body was apparently dumped at the location.
Guzman had been reported missing a month earlier. She left her home in Lincoln Heights the day after Christmas to go to a store but never returned.
Police initially did not believe the two killings were related. But then-Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said in 2017 that detectives were eventually able to connect the crimes and requested permission from the state Attorney General’s Office to perform a familial DNA search.
“After the familial search, a person was identified as a contributory match to the suspect,” Beck said shortly after Borjas’ arrest. “That individual was (the) suspect’s father, who was arrested on a non-sexual-assault-type crime earlier in his life.”
After conducting further information into the father’s background, detectives “identified a family member who they thought possibly could be the suspect involved in these (crimes) and they collected a surreptitious DNA sample,” Beck said. “They did this by following that individual. During that following, he spit on the sidewalk. Detectives collected that and the DNA was a match. It was a match to both of these murders.”
The case marked the second time Los Angeles police had relied on a familial DNA search, which can narrow the search for a suspect to a particular family and point detectives to suspects whose DNA is not yet in a database. Beck noted that Borjas’ DNA was not in any existing database prior to his arrest.
The LAPD also used familial DNA in the “Grim Sleeper” serial killer case, in which detectives used a discarded pizza crust to collect DNA linking the killings to Lonnie David Franklin Jr., who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2016. He died while on death row in March 2020.
Prosecutors were originally seeking the death penalty against Borjas, but that punishment was taken off the table following the election of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, who opposes capital punishment.
Guzman’s mother said during a court hearing in 2021 that the decision was a “slap in the face” to the victims’ families.
Borjas was sentenced in December 2022 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In a July 9 ruling, a three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal found that Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler did not abuse his discretion by denying Borjas’ requests to act as his own attorney.
The appellate court panel noted that comments made by the judge and Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman supported the finding that the defendant was “likely to disrupt the proceedings if allowed to represent himself.”