Episode Transcript
Producer: Before we start, just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode includes graphic descriptions of violence, homicide, and briefly references a suicide. If you or someone you know needs support, we’ve got links to resources in the episode description.
Steven Rascón: Sukey, did you wanna start with the first question?
Sukey Lewis: The first thing we were gonna say is that we understand it can be difficult and emotional, so if there’s some point where you need to take a break or you don’t wanna talk, that’s, that’s okay. If there’s any questions that you’re not comfortable with.
Steven Rascón: Si te cuesta hablar de esto díganos, podemos tomar una descanso.
Sukey Lewis: In September of 2022, one of the show’s producers, Steven Rascon, and I got on a Zoom call with this woman.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Ok. Mi nombre es este “eme a” rosario Buena Zaragoza.
Sukey Lewis: Ma Rosario is the mother of Luis Giovanny Aguilar the, man whose murder in the day room at New Folsom Prison is at the heart of our story, the same man on the video that Officer Valentino Rodriguez showed his father at the Christmas party — a brutal stabbing that seemed to go on and on, while the officer in the control booth only fired those foam bullets. Questions about this murder and whether officers had set it up had also consumed Sgt. Kevin Steele up until the last day of his life. And we knew at this point, almost three years later, the FBI was also still looking into this case, just like we were. We hoped the woman on this Zoom call could help us understand a bit about the victim at the center of all this, her son.
Steven Rascón: Y cómo fue tu relación con Luis Giovanny?
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Muy bonita para mi muy bonita la relación de mi hijo.
Claudia Bohorquez: We had a very beautiful relationship. He was very sweet.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Yo adoraba mi hijo.
Claudia Bohorquez: I adored him.
Sukey Lewis: That’s Claudia Bohorquez, Ma Rosario’s attorney, who’s helping Ma Rosario sue New Folsom officials and is translating for her.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Estoy en Tijuana…
Sukey Lewis: Ma Rosario had moved back to Tijuana from Los Angeles after she split up with Luis Giovanny’s dad, but her son stayed living in LA.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Cuando mi hijo fue a la cárcel… pues me sentí mal. Me puse a llorar.
Claudia Bohorquez: When my son went to jail, I felt horrible. I got sick.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: The police report says in 2009, Luis Giovanny got in an argument with his girlfriend, and he hit her. She was holding their one-year-old daughter. Luis Giovanny, who was 19 at the time, swung again, missing his girlfriend and giving his daughter a bloody nose. He took a plea deal and was sent to prison. He got out in 2018.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Me quería desmayar cuando lo vi…
Claudia Bohorquez: I wanted to faint when I saw him.
Sukey Lewis: Out of prison and now in his late 20s, he came to see his mom in Tijuana.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Porque fue una impresión ver a mi bebe tan grandote tan guapo.
Claudia Bohorquez: It was a very strong impact for me to see my baby now a grown man, and so handsome.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Yo lo miraba muy feliz y yo tengo esa foto muy feliz…
Sukey Lewis: She holds up a picture from that visit.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Y una foto donde me dio una abrazo, fuerte fuerte.
Sukey Lewis: They’re side by side, hugging each other tightly, their faces pressed against each other. Luis Giovanny looks young, with a buzzed haircut and mustache. It was the last time she saw him. After his visit, Luis Giovanny went back to The States, and before too long, again got arrested, this time for stealing a car and trying to flee police. Claudia, the attorney, says this whole thing was based on a misunderstanding. It was his uncle’s car, and he took it without asking. But with his prior record, he was sent back to prison for four years. And of course, he wasn’t sent to just any prison. He ended up in the most dangerous prison in the state, locked up in an incredibly high-security unit with men who’d been convicted of the most serious crimes.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Todo ese tiempo yo no pude hablar con él, solo por cartas.
Claudia Bohorquez: I couldn’t talk to him, I could only communicate with him through letters. I could not speak to him.
Sukey Lewis: Ma Rosario tells us her son didn’t want her to worry about him, so in his letters, he didn’t really talk about his life in prison, but he would send artwork.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Sí, él lo dibujó.
Sukey Lewis: That’s amazing.
[Music]
Over Zoom, she shows us some pictures he drew.
A little closer too. Isn’t that amazing?
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: A la pantalla…cerca
Sukey Lewis: Including a detailed, almost photorealistic black-and-white portrait of his grandfather, Ma Rosario’s father, a man with strong cheekbones, wearing a cowboy hat.
That’s so good.
Claudia Bohorquez: Wow.
Sukey Lewis: The last letter she received from him was in early December, 2019. Eight days later, she says she was out looking for a Christmas tree. When she got home, she noticed that she had missed a bunch of calls. Her ex, Luis Giovanny’s father, was trying to get in touch with her, so she called him, already fearing something terrible had happened.
Claudia Bohorquez: He didn’t know even how to tell me that, that our son was, had been killed.
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Cuando yo supe la noticia, cuando exploté, yo grité y le di golpes a la pared.
Claudia Bohorquez: She said, “When I found out, I, I screamed. I hit the wall.”
Sukey Lewis: What did they say had happened to him?
Ma Rosario Bueno Zaragoza: Una pelea.
Claudia Bohorquez: That he had, uh, it was a fight, and that they had stabbed my son.
Sukey Lewis: A fight?
Claudia Bohorquez: Yes, a fight.
Sukey Lewis: That was the first story she was told about her son’s death, and we know this was not true. There was no fight.
[Theme music]
Sukey Lewis: Ma Rosario, just like us, is still trying to understand what is the real truth of what happened on December 12, 2019, in the restricted, high-security B8 Unit at New Folsom Prison. In this episode, we’re gonna dive deep into this case to try to answer that question, but it won’t be easy. Key witnesses have died, evidence is missing, and everyone we talked to who knows what happened seems to have a reason to lie. I’m Sukey Lewis. This is On Our Watch Season 2: New Folsom.
Before we get into the weeds, let’s start with the basic facts of what happened on December 12, 2019, facts that aren’t disputed, and that are reflected in internal CDCR reports that were leaked to us by a confidential source.
[Music]
That day, 29-year-old Luis Giovanny Aguilar was brought down by officers into the day room, a shared space, typically used for recreation and classes. It was a new program, and pretty unusual for a solitary housing unit, or a SHU, like this. Two other men, Cody Taylor and Anthony Rodriguez, were brought down next, and there’s an elaborate security protocol to this. Each of the men were strip searched, wanded with a metal detector, and placed in restraints, handcuffs attached to a waist chain and ankle restraints.
Once in the day room, each of these men were then attached by those ankle shackles to their chairs. Overlooking the day room was a control booth, where an officer sat. His job was to monitor the unit, and he had a 40-millimeter gun that shot foam projectiles and a deadly Mini-14 rifle in the booth for use if necessary. We do not know what the officer was doing or if he saw that Rodriguez and Taylor were working quickly to get out of their restraints. Once freed, Rodriguez went up the stairs and retrieved two long improvised knives from the cell of another incarcerated man on the second tier, Dion Green.
Rodriguez then came back down and handed one of the knives to Taylor. The two then approached Aguilar and began stabbing him as he sat shackled and unable to move. They stabbed him 55 times. The reports that were leaked by a confidential source do not say how long this took. They also don’t say when the control booth officer took action, but at some point, he did fire four foam rounds. Taylor and Rodriguez eventually stopped their attack, threw down their weapons, and lay facedown on the floor. Responding officers flooded into the day room. Among the officers who responded that day was Sgt. Kevin Steele. Steele, trained as a medic in the Air Force, tried to resuscitate Aguilar, but all the efforts to revive him were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead at the on-site medical center.
Dion Green: I knew Kevin knew something.
Sukey Lewis: This is Dion Green. He was in his cell in the second tier of the housing unit. Minutes earlier, he’d handed the knives under the door to Anthony Rodriguez, and then the murder played out. Now he watched as the veteran investigator took in the scene.
Dion Green: He was the only one, when they all came inside the day room, it was about 30, 40 cops, squad and everybody. He was the only one just looking around. He was looking. He was standing there just looking, and wanted to know, “How the hell did they pull this off?” And he was just looking at the cameras, looking at the, the locks, the chains, looking up, you know, at the, at, at the cell, looking up how we came, uh, orchestrated everything. He was like, “Nah, something’s missing.”
Sukey Lewis: But at first, all the evidence pointed to an open-and-shut case. Within hours, Green had confessed to ordering the hit, and all three men were eventually charged with murder. Cody Taylor pled out first, taking a 102-year sentence. Anthony Rodriguez pled next and got 34 years to life.
Dion Green: And I’m the only one that hasn’t resolved my issues with, with the case yet.
Sukey Lewis: You’ll hear from Taylor and Rodriguez later on too, but I wanted to talk to Green first, because I knew from reading through court documents and talking to sources that Steele had convinced Green to do something pretty remarkable: cooperate with his investigation. It seemed like he was the key to understanding Steele’s obsession with this case. Now keep in mind, Green also has his own reasons for talking to me.
Dion Green: My life is on the line here. Please understand this. This is as serious it is as I, as I’m telling you, ma’am. If I don’t die from my heart failure, I’m gonna die in the hands of CDCR. They’re gonna set me up and kill me, I promise you that.
[Driving music]
Sukey Lewis: Department officials have said in court filings that Green is not in danger. Over the past year, I’ve talked to Green many times. Originally from the Chicago and Detroit areas, Green was convicted of murder in California when he was 20. He’s been in prison ever since. Last year, I visited him at a prison in Stockton, California for people with serious medical conditions. He’s 50 years old now, and needs a walker to get around.
Dion Green: I’m not as healthy as I used to be. I never been around this corner before. I’m not the same as I used to be, but I’m still considered a very dangerous man.
Sukey Lewis: Green has dark eyes, with an unusual gray-blue ring around them. He says they’ve always been that way. He’s black and Puerto Rican, and he has pentagram tattoos on his hands and 666 tattooed on the back of his head. In prison, he goes by the nickname G Satan, or Satan. Four-and-a-half years ago, before the murder, before his heart problems and his health deteriorated, when he was transferred into the restricted B8 Unit at New Folsom Prison, he says he had even more power.
Dion Green: Everything ran through me, you know what I’m saying? Everything ran through me.
Sukey Lewis: A lot of people were in the B8 unit for committing new crimes in prison. That’s part of what the unit was for, and Green was no exception. He’d been moved to New Folsom because he was found with a weapon after trying to kill a man in Lancaster State Prison in Southern California. That man was named Michael Britt, and he’s important because what happened with Britt laid the groundwork for everything that happened later with Luis Giovanny Aguilar.
[Music]
When Green showed up at New Folsom in September of 2019, he discovered something. His old enemy, Britt, was also there, in the exact same unit.
Dion Green: When I got here, moving me over to long-term, was my documented enemy — that’s how all started it. You put me right next to him on an ongoing case.
Sukey Lewis: Now, CDCR policy doesn’t outright bar wardens from placing two people like this, who are documented enemies, near each other. There are a lot of enemies behind bars, and sometimes it can’t be helped. For example, both Britt and Green likely had to be in the restricted unit because of their histories and how the department had classified them, but within that restricted unit, there were three different housing sections. Officers I spoke to say choosing to put both Green and Britt in the same housing section was a bad idea and a big security risk. And looking at this case, you can see why. Just a couple weeks after Green arrives in the unit, two men slip out of their cuffs in the day room and stab his enemy, Michael Britt, multiple times, as Green looked on from his chair in the day room. Britt is rushed to the hospital and ultimately survives this second attempt on his life. Green tells prison officials he was behind it.
Dion Green: I went in there as an older homie. I said, “Listen, this case is some business from Lancaster. You guys wasn’t even supposed to put us together.” X, Y, and Z, I went in there and said what I needed to say.
Sukey Lewis: Green said he was a high-ranking member of a prison gang who orchestrated the hit by, “Influencing two inmates to carry it out,” according to court records. Those two incarcerated men under his influence were Cody Taylor and Anthony Rodriguez. So within a month of arriving at New Folsom, Green had found his hitters, and established himself as the shot caller of the secure housing unit.
[Music]
Two months after the attempt on Britt, this same team struck again, the same guys, in the same housing section, in the same day room. But this time, the victim was Luis Giovanny Aguilar, and this time, their victim died. When Green was interviewed by investigators from the DA’s office that same night, he claimed responsibility.
Dion Green: “It was me. I ordered this.” You know what I’m saying? “It was this business.” You know, I went in there and, uh, made it seem like that I was just the worst fucking dude on the face of this Earth, you know? That I was this heartless fucking dude, and I just killed this dude in this gang business, and it, you know, that’s my statements.
Sukey Lewis: Internal reports leaked by a confidential source reflect this. These reports say that Green called the murder, “Business.”
Dion Green: That’s what the script was, so it can just all go away.
Sukey Lewis: But now Green says that script was just a story.
Dion Green: That shit was made up, man, period.
[Ad break]
Sukey Lewis: I was asking what you, what you know about Dion Green.
Tinkerbell: Dion Green… What, oh, the inmate?
Sukey Lewis: The shot caller, yeah.
Tinkerbell: Yeah.
Sukey Lewis: Or, the quote-unquote-
Tinkerbell: You know, honestly, I think if, uh, people worked hard enough, I think you could get him to tell you the truth.
Sukey Lewis: This correctional officer retired from the department after working at New Folsom for 15 years. She didn’t want us to use her real name, because she’s afraid of retaliation, so my co-reporter Julie gave her a codename: Tinkerbell.
Tinkerbell: Aww.
Julie Small: [laughs] ‘Cause your hairstyle reminds me-
Tinkerbell: Oh, yeah, I love-
Julie Small: …of her hairstyle.
Tinkerbell: …Tinkerbell. Oh yeah, totally.
Julie Small: [laughs].
Sukey Lewis: She explains why Green had power in the prison.
[Music]
Tinkerbell: He’s a shot caller because he’s got a lot of people that put money on his books. He has access to dope. So you have a bunch of dope heads and people that are in there, and they know that all they have to do is kill somebody in order to, you know, be in good graces with Green, or to get the dope, or to whatever. They have nothing to lose.
Sukey Lewis: What Tinkerbell’s pointing out is that life can be cheap in prison — the cost of a cell phone or some drugs. In the past decade, at least 33 people have been killed in New Folsom alone. We tried to compare this number to prisons across the state, but both the Department of Justice and CDCR had problems with their data, so getting an accurate number of people killed in California prisons was impossible. When Luis Giovanny Aguilar was killed, Tinkerbell says she was off work recovering from an injury, and didn’t think much of it.
Tinkerbell: When you hear that, it’s like it’s, “Okay, well, I mean, it’s, oh, it’s another homicide.”
Sukey Lewis: But when she got back to work, she started looking into the details of what happened with the murder.
Tinkerbell: Whenever we had incidents, or whenever we got new inmates, I was very nosy. I want to know and understand these guys’ mentality. I wanna know what their history is at other prisons. Um, I wanna know whatever I can to protect other inmates, to protect that inmate, and to protect our staff, always, always, always why I was nosy.
Sukey Lewis: She says she already knew the reputations of his killers, Rodriguez and Taylor, so she was snooping through their prior cases.
[Music]
Tinkerbell: I was looking at Taylor’s history, and I saw that he had stabbed Britt, and I went in, and I was like, “Oh, well what’s the circumstances of this?”
Sukey Lewis: And she started to connect the dots. Before they killed Aguilar, they’d tried the same thing with Michael Britt.
Tinkerbell: And like, my red flags started going off in a major way. I’m like, first of all, how in the hell did it happen almost identically twice? And how in the hell did these guys get out of their cuffs, or weren’t supervised, knowing that they had already gotten out of their cuffs and done this to Britt? How the hell did this happen?
Sukey Lewis: Red flag number one, starting with the attack on Britt in the day room, Tinkerbell wanted to know why these two documented enemies, Dion Green and Michael Britt, were housed together.
Tinkerbell: At no point should they have been on the same yard, let alone the same building.
Sukey Lewis: Britt and Green?
Tinkerbell: Correct.
Sukey Lewis: Again, department policy doesn’t say this is forbidden, but enemy concerns are a key factor in determining where it’s safe to house someone.
Tinkerbell: That is a huge safety issue and no-no.
Sukey Lewis: And so to your mind, is this, um, incompetence or is this by design?
Tinkerbell: Well, at minimum, it’s incompetence.
Sukey Lewis: Red flag number two, after the attempted murder on Britt, they still kept all these guys housed in the same section together.
Tinkerbell: I’m not gonna sit here and judge whether, um, Aguilar was a good person or not, because it doesn’t matter. That wasn’t our job. Our job was to protect him.
Sukey Lewis: And everything she was reading in these reports was telling her they’d failed to do that job.
[Phone static] Hello?
Dion Green: Ma’am, how are you?
Sukey Lewis: I’m doing okay. How are you this morning, Dion?
Dion Green: Oh, I’m just-
Sukey Lewis: One second. I’m just trying to get my recorder hooked up, if that’s okay.
Dion Green: So you record, you record our whole conversation, or you, or are you gonna edit some stuff, or how does that work?
Sukey Lewis: Um, yeah. I’m recording it, and then I will edit it. I will edit it, so…
Over the course of our many conversations like this one, Green tells me that it was in early 2020 — now facing a murder charge for Aguilar and two attempted murder charges for Britt — that he started seeing quite a bit of Sgt. Kevin Steele. Steele, as the criminal prosecution coordinator, was the person who brought Green back and forth to take legal phone calls, and then as the pandemic got underway in 2020, to attend court hearings over Zoom. Green says Steele was trying to get him to talk, but he was sticking to his story.
Dion Green: You know, and I was just constantly still lying to him, telling him that, uh, you know, “Ah man, it’s, this is what it was, man. Bottom line, he just had to go, and that was that.” I was, I just stuck to my statements, and kept going, you know? But he kept shooting little shots like, “Something’s keeping me up at night, Mr. Green,” and I was like, “Well uh, I don’t know what to tell you,” you know?
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: But then, Green says, Steele found something that would change his whole understanding of the case.
Dion Green: That’s when he came and says, “Hey, uh, you know, we, we need to really talk.”
Sukey Lewis: What Steele had found was a surveillance video of the B8 unit. According to Green, what this video shows is a dry run, where you can see them walking through some of the steps leading up to the murder. If true, this was a stunning piece of evidence.
Can you, can you describe the dry run a little bit for me?
Dion Green: The dry run was exact same as the murder. The dry run was it was Monster and Kill-Kill.
Sukey Lewis: Monster is Taylor’s prison name, and Kill-Kill is what they call Rodriguez.
Dion Green: Monster and Kill-Kill was in the day room. I was in the cell.
Sukey Lewis: It took place a week before the murder. Green says the two men were both brought out and shackled to chairs in the day room. The practice run was necessary, Green says, because after the attack on Britt, a new security measure had been added to the day room routine. Now, when they were brought out and chained to their chairs, a box, usually used in prison transport, was placed over the cuffs around their ankles, totally covering the keyhole, making them much more difficult to pick.
Dion Green: Since it’s double locked, the cuff won’t move. The cuff will not move. It won’t give an inch or nothing. The cuff just does not move.
Sukey Lewis: But there is a way around these black boxes. If the officers single lock the cuffs, out of laziness or forgetfulness, or as Green says, intentionally, you can easily slide a thin, flat piece of metal, like a flattened paper clip, into the side of the cuffs, lifting the teeth of the mechanism and popping it open. This totally circumvents the black boxes. Green says for all this to work, there was one more thing they needed to have in place: the help of officers.
Dion Green: Everybody had it arranged with the COs that the test run and stuff was gonna happen today. So, we told them to be sure that you leave it single locked.
Sukey Lewis: Green says ahead of the practice run, the officers in the unit had agreed to single lock the cuffs around their ankles, allowing them to test their plan, and Green says it worked like a dream. Taylor was out of his cuffs in seconds, and came to the door of Green’s cell, grabbed the weapons, and brought them back down to the day room.
Dion Green: On the video, it shows Monster engage in conversation with the towers and stuff, were talking to ’em. Monster and them w- was talking to ’em, the tower.
Sukey Lewis: By the tower, Green means the officer in the control booth overlooking the day room. Again, if true, this video appeared to reveal that officers had seen these two guys, who’d slipped their cuffs and tried to kill someone two months earlier, in the day room, and one of them gets out of those cuffs again, and the officers don’t do anything to stop it. Steele thought this was very strange that officers had allowed this to happen, Green says.
Dion Green: He brought the test run to me, he showed me on video, and that’s when it, that’s when the lies stopped. The lies stopped then, and the truth had to, had to, you know, start being told, and that’s where we at now.
Sukey Lewis: Green says he asked Steele what he was going to do.
Dion Green: “Uh, are you going to just continue covering this up, like the, you know, the rest of your officers, the rest of you?” “No, I can’t. Absolutely not. I took an oath. I took an oath, and I stand on that. My integrity, my morals, my honor, you know? I, I, I had to, I have to.”
Sukey Lewis: Here’s what Green says he told Steele. Officers, Green calls them cops, had told him that Aguilar was a child molester.
Dion Green: When the cops said that he’s a child molester, when you bring this information to guys in prison, right? Child molesters, rapists, and stuff like that, it’s somebody that’s, that, that’s a no-no for us, you know?
Sukey Lewis: There are a lot of rules in prison, the official rules of the institution and the unwritten rules that everyone, including a lot of the officers, live by, or as Green says, manipulate for their own purposes. Green says the lieutenant of the unit, a man named Eric Baker, came to him because he was the shot caller, and asked him to handle Aguilar.
Dion Green: So, and you know, my name always came up with, with, with the “good business” you know? “He’s a serious man. He’s serious about his business, but he knows how to keep his mouth shut,” you know? So that’s how they just… You know, they just know in prison. You just know. COs know, and we know, who’s dirty and crooked. You know, once you’re in the game long enough.
Sukey Lewis: But Green says he told Sgt. Steele that this lieutenant was the actual shot caller, and that Baker threatened him and forced him to carry out the murder. Now, I wanna be clear. We do not have any evidence of Baker’s involvement beyond Green’s word. In court filings, Baker has denied any involvement, and he told me on the phone that none of the multiple investigations into this incident have found him guilty of anything. When Green told me this about Baker, I was a bit skeptical.
For one, it just seems like too many motives. They killed Aguilar because he was a child molester, because they were paid by officers to do so, and because they were threatened. So many times during these conversations with Green, I wished I could talk to Steele and ask him what he made of this man’s story, if there were aspect he’d doubted, but I had no way to do that, and no way to know if I was even getting the same story Green had told Steele. What Green told me is that Baker arranged for everything, for an officer to bring him the cutting tool to make the knives, for an officer to bring in heroin, methamphetamine, and weed for Green to give Taylor and Rodriguez as payment, an officer to make sure that the cuffs were not double locked, allowing them to escape the black boxes, and he directed the officer in the control booth not to fire the deadly Mini-14 rifle.
[Music]
Dion Green: There was no gunfire, no Mini, no nothing. Your job is to save a person’s life, you know? So it’s, it’s just a lot of moving pieces to this, this execution that took place. You know, it was an execution.
Sukey Lewis: Aguilar, as we’ve said before, has no convictions for molesting a child, but Dion Green says he didn’t find this out until months after the murder, when Steele told him. Green says it became clear that officers had manipulated him. There was a different reason they wanted Aguilar dead.
Dion Green: Truth of the matter is it’s because of one damn reason, and that was because he assaulted the staff.
Sukey Lewis: Aguilar had assaulted an officer. Documents show about a week before the murder, as Aguilar was coming out of the shower, he kicked him in the chest.
Dion Green: You just can’t… Man, that, that just… Uh, that, that don’t go on. You just can’t assault the police or just assault without them doing nothing, without something, and if the right crew was on, it could cost you your life, like it did him.
[Ad break]
Tinkerbell: Do I believe that an officer intentionally did or ordered this? In my gut, I have a very hard time saying yes.
Sukey Lewis: Retired correctional officer, codenamed Tinkerbell, tells Julie and me there’s another scenario that’s not uncommon.
Tinkerbell: Sometimes on tiers, people say stuff about inmates that they don’t like, that may or may not be true, so that other people assault them. So, for instance, I don’t like Julie. I’m on the tier, and I know that other inmates don’t like Julie, and I’m an officer, and I go up to Julie, and I’m like, “Julie, you shouldn’t have done this to that kid. You’re such a piece of shit.” And everyone else on the tier hears it. Now, the tier thinks that Julie is a child abuser, or a molester, or what have you. So now, me as an inmate, I’m gonna be like, “Hey, don’t worry about this. I got this,” and then they take care of business.
Sukey Lewis: I’ve heard this from other incarcerated people too, and there’s a documented case of something similar happening at another California prison in 2017. An incarcerated person came forward and told prison officials that he was part of a crew that officers allowed out of their cells in order to attack sex offenders. An investigation found a cache of weapons in a locked area only accessible to officers, and four officers were fired. Tinkerbell says Aguilar’s history shows he was difficult to handle.
Tinkerbell: Aguilar was a, was a mouthy little shithead, but all in all, he didn’t do anything to have this happen to him.
Sukey Lewis: But were all these people involved? The officers on duty the day of the killing, more officers who were there for the practice run, even a lieutenant? And did the videos of the practice run and the murder really show what Green said they showed? Could there be another, less nefarious explanation?
[Music]
It was hard to believe that such a complex and widespread conspiracy could take place in an institution with so many eyes watching, and why would officers risk their careers, their pensions, over a mouthy young guy? Again, these officers have denied any involvement, and as we uncovered evidence and looked over leaked documents, we discovered there was a big hold in Green’s explanation of the motive. Yes, Aguilar had assaulted an officer. Disciplinary records show that assault took place on December 6, 2019, six days before the murder. But here’s the thing. The practice run, where Green said they tested their plan to escape the black boxes, that actually happened the day before, on December 5th. So unless we were missing something, the plan to take Aguilar out had to have already been in place before Aguilar kicked that officer in the chest.
I knew I’d have to ask Green about this discrepancy at some point, but I still couldn’t understand, if no officers were involved, if everything Green said was a lie, how had allegations that officers played a role in this murder made it all the way to the FBI? Officially, the FBI refused to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, but in late September 2023, I spoke to a special agent on the phone who said the case was still active, and right before we launched this series, CDCR confirmed there is an ongoing investigation into Aguilar’s murder, involving outside law enforcement. CDCR declined to comment further. So, the FBI clearly thought there was something worth a multiyear investigation, and Steele, who’d worked in the ISU for years and had access to a lot more evidence than we did, appeared to take Green’s story very seriously.
Data we obtained from internal CDCR emails shows that about seven months after Aguilar was killed, Steele emailed Warden Jeff Lynch regarding interviews he’d done, video recordings of Dion Green’s statements, and other videos of Steele interviewing Cody Taylor, Monster.
Did you ever record any interviews with Kevin Steele?
Cody Taylor: No, no.
Sukey Lewis: This is Cody Taylor, and this is not true. I’ve spoken to multiple people who’ve seen those recordings that Steele made with Taylor, and I’ve seen them referenced in internal CDCR emails. But I also understand why he doesn’t want to admit it.
Why tell me and not him?
Cody Taylor: Well, it’s one thing to talk to the public, right? And it’s one thing to talk about the police, right? But it’s another thing… Like, you don’t be talking about inmates, and you don’t fucking talk to squad, which is another terminology for IGI, which is the gang taskforce.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: This is another one of those rules of prison life. Just like there’s a code of silence among officers, there’s a code of silence among incarcerated people.
Cody Taylor: Like, you just don’t talk to them, period.
Sukey Lewis: When Taylor pleaded guilty, remember, he got 102 years, so the rules of prison life are the rules that will likely govern the rest of his life.
Cody Taylor: But, I think what you guys really need to understand out there, man, is, you know, I didn’t create prison. I’m just living here trying to survive it, right?
Sukey Lewis: As I spoke to Taylor, I tried to keep these rules in mind, and the other motivations that he likely had for talking to me. Before we talked on the phone in September of 2023, I had exchanged a few letters with him. Taylor had told me he was part of a gang and would need their permission to do the interview, so that was one factor. He also said he was interested in writing a book and that I could get famous if I helped him. So going into the interview, I already knew by his own admission that he was likely bound by the rules of his gang and wanted to promote their power, and that he was interested in fame, or at least notoriety. And so there’s this central tension in understanding everything that Taylor says. He both wants to talk and is fearful of crossing the gang or the guards.
Cody Taylor: Coming in as a juvenile, I learned real quick, man, that, you know, it’s a different society in here, and it’s survival of the fittest, and so at the end of the day, you gotta choose. Do you wanna be a victim or you wanna be a suspect?
Sukey Lewis: Taylor says he killed Aguilar because he was in a warring gang. But like Green, he says without officer help, they couldn’t have gotten out of their shackles.
Cody Taylor: There’s only two ways to get out of a black box.
Sukey Lewis: One, he said, is to pick the master padlock on the black boxes, but that takes time. The other way is to get help from officers.
Cody Taylor: If you look in the video, I’m out of my handcuffs within a matter of five seconds, so you know, you, you add one plus one, you, you, you’ll get the answer.
Sukey Lewis: According to Taylor, Aguilar’s assault on an officer the day after the practice run on December 6th just tipped the scales in their favor.
Cody Taylor: It just so happened to happen that Mr. Aguilar assaulted one of ’em, and they came back immediately the next day and was like, “Here, bam. We got you. Don’t worry.”
Sukey Lewis: Because, Taylor says, after Aguilar assaulted an officer, correctional staff in the unit agreed to facilitate the murder. This could partially explain the discrepancy in the timeline, because in Taylor’s telling, the assault is not a motive for officers to order the killing, but instead a motive for them to allow the killing, to single lock the cuffs and to agree not to fire the deadly Mini-14 rifle.
Cody Taylor: The reality behind the scenes is, is most of the murders in prison are done, or been able to be done, because the police let them. Number one, the police know about it before it’s gonna happen. Number two, they either allow it to happen, or number three, they do not do nothing to stop it from happening. And still to this day, man, you, you know, you run into a police officer, their favorite line is, “Hey, bro. This is level four. If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen,” you know? So-
Sukey Lewis: What do-
Cody Taylor: … they don’t do nothing to stop it.
Sukey Lewis: For people who might not understand what that, what that phrase means, like, what does that mean to you, “This is level four, it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen”?
Cody Taylor: Yeah, so this is a maximum-security prison. The highest level, the most violent killers in the state of California are housed in one square little box, and if they’re gonna kill somebody, or the mob is gonna have them killed, it’s gonna happen. They’re not gonna stop it, because as soon as the police start to get involved in mob hits, it’s, it’s gonna be, you know, they’re gonna get killed, and so that in itself, the police do do the most not to get involved in prison gang politics.
Sukey Lewis: So Taylor says that officers, in retaliation for the assault on one of their own and in order to keep their own safe, helped them carry out the murder.
Cody Taylor: All right, ma’am. Well, you, well, you know where I’m at.
Sukey Lewis: Okay. All right. Thank you, Cody.
[Driving music]
About a month after we spoke on the phone, I sent Taylor a message on his prison tablet. When he talked about his motive for the murder, he’d made it all about gang stuff, but I wanted to know if he’d also heard the rumor that Aguilar was a child molester. He replied back, “Yes. It turns out he wasn’t, some shit the police were saying. But Mr. Steele, the ISU officer, RIP, did in fact clarify.” So, that was another piece of Green’s story that Taylor backed up.
But in the next few messages Taylor sent me, he seemed to be spiraling. He said he was worried about having to testify in the lawsuit brought by Aguilar’s mom, and then that he was gonna file a lawsuit himself and subpoena me. The final message he sent was perhaps the most confusing of all. “Hey, don’t publish that. It’s not true. I wanted to use the story and info for a book, sad face. Sorry to waste your time. It just wasn’t true.” I asked him to clarify what wasn’t true, but he didn’t reply, and he blocked me on the messaging app.
I think his fears about testifying in the lawsuit are a clue to Taylor’s sudden change of heart toward me. He had filed an objection in court, saying he wanted the family to know the truth, but it would put his life in danger to testify. A week after my last communication with Taylor, a judge heard Taylor’s objection, what’s called a motion to quash. I couldn’t record the hearing, but I listened in as Taylor told the judge his fears. Other incarcerated people could retaliate if they found out he’d broken the rules and worked with officers. Meanwhile, if he testified against the guards, he’d be in an impossible situation. He told the judge, “There’s two mysterious deaths, right? You got the officer Rodriguez that, you know, died of an overdose, and then you got the officer that quote-unquote ‘suicide.’ Like, just say hypothetically whatever I’m saying is bullshit, right? Whether it’s bullshit or not, which I, there’s evidence to support otherwise, but just the fact of me going up against these officers, I’m always gonna lose, Your Honor.”
In this hearing, which was public, Taylor said that Steele had talked about getting him somewhere safe, like federal custody. The judge sounded very sympathetic to Taylor’s concerns, but said there was no legal basis to allow him not to testify.
[Music]
After this, we went back and forth about what to include from Taylor. We didn’t wanna heighten the danger to him, but to leave out his story and choices he made, including his decision to talk to Steele, would also distort the truth. It’s our job to tell the truth. It’s ultimately CDCR’s job to keep him safe.
Since the murder, he’s been bounced around to a few different prisons, including Pelican Bay in Stockton, where I talked to him. But just weeks before Taylor was supposed to give that deposition, CDCR transferred him again, back to New Folsom Prison. On the day he was supposed to be deposed, Taylor refused to attend the hearing, according to court documents. The attorney for CDCR is still trying to get him to testify.
[Music break]
Anthony Rodriguez: I was actually surprised to hear him saying that, you know, his life was in danger.
Sukey Lewis: This is Taylor’s friend, Anthony Rodriguez, the third man who was charged in the murder, and is currently in Lancaster State Prison in Los Angeles County.
Anthony Rodriguez: I got, uh, 35 years to life for the murder, and 25 years to life for the attempted murder on Britt, and seven to life for the, for the weapon.
Sukey Lewis: Wow. Okay.
I’d reached out to him by letter as a long shot. I honestly didn’t think he’d talk to me, because of the three guys who’d been involved in the murder, he was the only one who stuck to that rule. As far as I can tell, he never talked to Steele, or to internal affairs, or to the FBI. But for some reason, he did agree to talk to me, and later, he told me he agreed to give a deposition in the family’s lawsuit. He tells me, at first he couldn’t believe that Green and Taylor had talked to Steele, until his defense attorney showed him the videos Steele had made of his interviews with them — videos we still hadn’t been able to see.
Anthony Rodriguez: So I actually watched them myself.
Sukey Lewis: Oh, wow. Interesting. And did… What did… What did Taylor say in his video?
Anthony Rodriguez: Taylor said the same thing. He s- He said, uh, he said his, his life was in danger because he told them that the cops were involved. And like I said, a lot of stuff that they said wasn’t true. They added a lot more. I don’t know why. But there was some truth to it.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: Talking to Anthony Rodriguez was kind of surreal. I knew he’d committed a number of really terrible crimes. He and Taylor had even painted Aguilar’s blood across their faces. But the way he talked about killing Aguilar was totally casual. He said he did regret it, because if he hadn’t, he could be out right now.
Anthony Rodriguez: As far as remorse, I, I really don’t feel it too much. I’ve always been like that, since I was a kid. I’ve never had those, those types of emotions. You know what I mean?
Sukey Lewis: And he says he didn’t murder Aguilar because he was a child molester or because Green told him to. The reason he gives, his motive for killing Aguilar, is based on something that from the outside, seems small.
Um, can I ask w-Why Aguilar? Like, I was, I saw in your letter you said he crossed your name out on the yard, but like what does that mean?
Anthony Rodriguez: I mean literally just what it means, you know? Uh, I have a habit of, of… We go into the same cages all the time when we go to yard. They put us in dog cages. We, we call them dog cages.
Sukey Lewis: If you’re held in a restricted housing unit like B8, you do get to have time outside, but only in these solitary cages. So Rodriguez says he wrote his moniker, Kill-Kill, on the side of the cage, and Aguilar wrote his nickname, Raskal, over top of it.
Anthony Rodriguez: I have a habit of writing my name out in the cages, like with a pen, or a marker, or, or a crayon, or something, and that’s all he did. That, he just did that to me, and, and it’s, it’s a sign of big disrespect, so I did it.
Sukey Lewis: As for officer involvement, Rodriguez says part of what Green and Taylor told Steele is true. Officers did help them in important ways. He says they agreed not to double lock their cuffs and they agreed not to use the deadly Mini-14 rifle.
Would you have been able to pull off the murder the way that it happened, you know, without any kind of assistance or complicity with the officers?
Anthony Rodriguez: No.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: But when it comes to the officers’ motive, Rodriguez says he’s in the dark.
Anthony Rodriguez: To be honest with you, they probably got their own reasons. Uh, I really don’t know.
Sukey Lewis: In court filings, CDCR officials have denied that officers in any way helped these men carry out a murder. And I want to acknowledge something here. Each of these men are unreliable narrators, and I’m only playing small clips of the many hours I spent on the phone talking to them, in which I went down numerous rabbit holes and found plenty of contradictions and outright lies.
But there was something attractive about Rodriguez’s story. Unlike the story Green tells, it’s simple. There doesn’t need to be a mass conspiracy, just a couple officers who basically agreed to look the other way. Pieces of Taylor’s story also explained a few things, the funky timeline, and he proposed a motive that makes sense for officers, that they agreed to help in part because one of their own was assaulted, and because it’s just practical. If a murder is going to happen, they wanna make sure no officers get injured in the process.
Dion Green: Um- [Phone static]
Sukey Lewis: Did you go to the deposition?
Dion Green: I just… Yes, ma’am. I just came back right now.
Sukey Lewis: How was it?
Dion Green: And um… Probably it was like four hours, five hours.
Sukey Lewis: Wow.
In September 2023, Dion Green told his story again, over Zoom, to the attorney for the officers and Claudia Bohorquez, Ma Rosario’s lawyer.
And when we were last talking, you said you were n- not sure if you wanted to do it or not, that you were nervous about it. Um, what made the difference for you today?
Dion Green: I just woke up saying like, I, I got to do right. That’s all.
Sukey Lewis: Green says in the deposition, he repeated what he’d told Steele on the recorded video tapes about the practice run, the black boxes, and how they simply could not have pulled off the homicide without the help of officers. And he says he told Claudia that he also had a message for Aguilar’s family.
Dion Green: I told her, I said, “Ms. Claudia, I did that. And that was a bad call. And it’s killing me. I’m sorry. I am so sorry.” I said, “I, I’m hurt by it. I’m just hurt. I’m hurt. That’s not cool.” But what’s my hurt to, compared to them? You know? This is all about them. And you know, I hate that Steele died, ma’am.
Sukey Lewis: Mm-hmm.
Dion Green: I hate he killed himself, but you know, that, that was like my, like a good friend of mine, man. It, it, it sucked. And he couldn’t take it. And I’m proud of what he did, though. I, I’m proud.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: But Green says making the choice to talk to Steele has also left him very isolated. Within days of making those recorded statements, that Green believed would be kept confidential, the word was out on the housing tier that he had talked, and he says the label of snitch has followed him. Taylor and Rodriguez have both distanced themselves from Green, and Green says officers have threatened him. When Steele died, he says he lost his one ally.
Dion Green: Listen, I don’t have anything. Look, all I have is you. Look, I’m already wanted. They gonna kill me. CDC officers is gonna kill me. When you put it on, on blast, everything, you know? It’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be ugly. But I want the podcast to start, because I’m gonna sit back and I’m gonna do roll call. I’m gonna do role call on, on all of them, on all CDC officers. I’m doing roll call, period. The podcast is coming out. I’m telling everybody, yes.
Sukey Lewis: All right. Well, it’s not coming out for a while yet.
Dion Green: Yes. Yeah. Okay.
Sukey Lewis: Also, just like, you know, in terms of my, you know, my job and my motivations, like I am, I’m here, I’m trying to get to the truth. I’m trying to, like, f- understand what happened, and like why, why Steele, um, killed himself. So it just, it makes me nervous when you say, uh, uh, say all you have is me, ’cause like, I am not, like, you know, on your side. Like, I am not your advocate. Um, so I just wanna… I wanna be clear about that.
Dion Green: Yeah. I mean, it’s understandable. You know, I, I know that. You’re not on my side. You know what I’m saying? I know that. You got a job to do. You simply care about the job. All you care about is the facts of this, so you can… That’s your job. You don’t really care about me. You don’t care about none of that. I understand that. I am aware of that. This is the job. Nobody can tell you the truth of what took place in B8 on 12/12, except me.
Sukey Lewis: Mm-hmm.
Dion Green: The officers’ involvement and everything.
Sukey Lewis: Mm-hmm.
Dion Green: That’s all I’m telling you.
Sukey Lewis: Mm-hmm. Okay.
Dion Green: You know, I, I, I, I know what it, when, when it all comes…
Automated voice: This call and/or telephone number will be monitored and recorded.
Dion Green: Uh, I am not mixing up words or l- making up feelings or… No, I, I know what your job is.
Sukey Lewis: Okay.
Dion Green: I’m not naïve. Yeah. [laughs] I’m very cut and dry, and know what’s what.
Sukey Lewis: And that’s where we left it that day. I thank him for his time.
Okay. Talk to you soon.
Dion Green: All right.
Sukey Lewis: Bye, Dion. Stay well.
[Music]
Dion Green is a compelling person. In the hours we’ve spent on the phone, it’s been hard not to get sucked into his story, to maintain the distance to be able to evaluate whether he’s telling the truth or not. Once again, as I’ve been talking to him, I’ve been holding Steele in my mind, wishing I could talk to him and find out what he made of this guy, and what Green made of Steele. If Green recognized a man in the midst of a crisis of faith, and somehow played on it. As we neared our publication date, I knew I needed to ask Green about the biggest hole in his story: the timeline.
If the assault was the motive for the officers, how come all these plans were already in place to take out Aguilar?
Dion Green: Yeah, the p- Okay, no, not, not before, not before the assault on the police. No.
Sukey Lewis: The reports I’ve been able to get it says that Aguilar attacked somebody on December 6th, but the-
Dion Green: Right.
Sukey Lewis: … practice run video was December 5th, so the practice run was the day before Aguilar assaulted an officer.
Dion Green: No, the practice run happened on the, on the 7th, 9, 10, 11, 12, 7th, 8th 9, 10, 11, 12… The practice run happened on the 7th. Are you sure it was the… It, it was-
Sukey Lewis: As you can hear, Green wasn’t sure of the date. He said people don’t keep track of dates in prison. But he acknowledged that it didn’t make sense for the assault — the supposed motive — to come after the practice run. But he didn’t back off his story, that officers were motivated by Aguilar’s assault on a guard.
Dion Green: I don’t think my timeline is off. I could have swore he, he assaulted, assaulted staff earlier that month.
Sukey Lewis: Green knew there had been that incident in the shower, and thought it must have happened earlier than the report said. To be honest, this sounded pretty implausible. And then about a week-and-a-half after this conversation, I got a call in December 2023.
[Music]
Anonymous: He had an incident prior to that, that they didn’t write him up, because he had came from yard, and he had headbutted one of them.
Sukey Lewis: This man didn’t want us to use his name, because he’s afraid of being labeled a snitch, but he said we could use his voice. He tells me that this incident where Aguilar headbutted an officer happened before the time he kicked the officer in the shower, which put it before the practice run. I’d actually reached out to him months earlier, because I’d heard he was a witness to the murder, but he said he’d only just now gotten my message. He and Aguilar were housed near each other when that earlier assault happened. He says Aguilar was angry because something was going on with his daughter and he ran out of phone time.
Anonymous: And they wouldn’t give him another phone call, and he had headbutted them coming back from yard. And they beat him up, and they, they didn’t write him up because they had busted his nose.
Sukey Lewis: So they busted his nose. Why wouldn’t they write him up for that?
Anonymous: Because they now used excessive force, and it happened, and it, and it happened where he was… Like, I guess he wasn’t resisting no more. I guess when he headbutted one of them, he proned out on the ground.
Sukey Lewis: This man says that’s when a different officer kicked him in the face. That’s a policy violation, so he says officers didn’t document it. He tells me he remembers the nurse who came to Aguilar’s cell door. This man’s story about this incident is full of details, the names of the involved officers, the name of the nurse, the type of form that she filled out. I’m not including all those details here because I haven’t been able to find any other evidence to confirm that this incident happened. I did reach out to the nurse, but she said she couldn’t talk to me about anything related to CDCR. CDCR said there was no injury form for Aguilar. But all these details are things that investigators with access to the prison should be able to corroborate or disprove.
Did you ever talk to the FBI?
Anonymous: Uh, not to the actual FBI, but to Internal Affairs, to the DA, and to the ISU.
Sukey Lewis: He says they called him in for an interview because he’d sent a letter to the district attorney saying Aguilar’s murder had been a setup.
Anonymous: I sent the letter the same week of the murder.
Sukey Lewis: Other sources confirmed the existence of this man’s letter. He says Steele was in the room with prison officials and the district attorney’s office was on speakerphone.
Anonymous: They asked me, did I have any information, such as, “How did I know that it was a setup?” And I told them because they told him that they had to search his cell, and he told them that he didn’t want to come out the cell.
Sukey Lewis: At first, Aguilar had refused to come out to the day room, he says, because he was scared of being attacked, and that the officers made him come out anyway. In that letter, this man says he also told the DA that there was a practice run, where Taylor got out of his cuffs and ran around the day room, and that it was caught on surveillance cameras. He says this initial interview with the DA and prison officials happened within weeks of the murder.
Okay. All right. I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Anonymous: You’re welcome. You have a good day.
Sukey Lewis: You too. Bye.
[Music]
If true, this revelation was pretty incredible. Not only did this man share details of an earlier assault that could bolster Green’s story of staff retaliation, but he was also saying that prison officials knew there were allegations that this murder was a setup within weeks of the homicide. Yet, it does not appear that any officers were reassigned or that a meaningful investigation was launched until months later, after Steele started turning over stones. But what had started Steele going down that path, and when did he begin to feel that his efforts were being ignored? This is where we were at when this podcast launched in early February. Those questions kind of seemed unanswerable. And then, a huge bombshell landed in our laps.
[Ambient sound – driving] Here we are, Julie and I, in the car driving up towards Sacramento again.
Julie Small: Again.
Sukey Lewis: To see evidence that we have been wanting to see and trying to see for nearly two years now. And-
A secret source had reached out. And we were going to get to see the videos of the practice run and the homicide of Luis Giovanny Aguilar for ourselves.
Julie Small: We’re going to see it finally.
Sukey Lewis: And we don’t know quite what the circumstances will be, if we’ll be able to take the recordings and use them, or if we just will have an opportunity to view them. Um, but this is, is really a significant breakthrough, and it is coming week two of launch, so we [laughs] we have two episodes out already. We are supposed to be, uh, wrapping everything up, and this is, this is really a kind of game-changing, Earth-shattering development.
[Theme music]
But we still didn’t know — how would this change our understanding of these competing stories and our understanding of Kevin Steele? It turns out there were a lot of materials to go through, so bear with us, ’cause we need some time to make sense of them. The next episode in this series will be coming out on April 2nd, when you’ll finally get to hear the testimony that launched Steele’s investigation.
Cody Taylor: You know what? Initially, hey, uh, I didn’t say shit, man. I didn’t say shit to nobody, and, and I’m s- if anything, I should be treated like a king for me remaining silent.
Dion Green: The caliber of man of who I am, and my two brothers, and the hits that we have put down-
Sgt. Kevin Steele: Mm-hmm.
Dion Green: We are the number one security threat in B8. To not secure us-
Sgt. Kevin Steele: Mm-hmm.
Dion Green: … is a problem.
[Credits music]
Sukey Lewis: You’re listening to On Our Watch Season 2: New Folsom, from KQED. If you have any tips or feedback about the series, you can email us at onourwatch@kqed.org. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. This series is reported by me, Sukey Lewis, and Julie Small. It’s edited by Victoria Mauleón. It’s produced and scored by Steven Rascón and Chris Egusa. Sound design and mixing by Tarek Fouda. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts, and she executive produced the series. Meticulous fact-checking by Mark Betancourt. Additional research for this episode by Kathleen Quinn and Laura Fitzgerald, students in the investigative reporting program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, whose chair, David Barstow, provided valuable support for the whole series. Special thanks to Rahsaan Thomas of Ear Hustle, Sandhya Dirks of NPR, and KQED Health Correspondent April Dembosky. Original music by Ramtin Arablouei, including our theme song. Additional music from APM Music and Audio Network. Funding for On Our Watch is provided in part by Arnold Ventures and the California Endowment. And, thanks to KQED’s Otis R. Taylor, Jr., Managing Editor of News and Enterprise, Ethan Toven-Lindsey, our Vice President of News, and Chief Content Officer Holly Kernan. Thanks for listening.
