A real estate theft scheme led to the murder of an auto repair business owner in South LA, according to charges filed against David Nelson, who is on trial for the 2013 murder of Rigoberto Dupre. More than a decade after the murder, Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson laid out a complicated story of fraud, deception, and violence to which Nelson has pleaded not guilty.
According to the prosecution, Nelson and Dupre collaborated in a plot to steal equity from an apartment complex in Inglewood. The plot supposedly involved having Dupre pose as the property owner to obtain a loan in the amount of $375 thousand against the building’s value, which was then transferred into gold coins. According to Thompson, it took the financing company’s investigators two years to confront Dupre about the deception, at which point he confessed to the plot and pointed to Nelson as the idea man.
Reportedly, Dupre’s son told detectives that Nelson had warned him, “You know what could happen if he talks.”
The prosecutors said that Nelson paid Tina Alexander, an associate of his, $5000 to plan and execute the murder of Dupre. Alexander has already pleaded guilty to the murder and, in a deal made for a lenient sentence of 15 years to life, testified against Nelson in the case.
Alexander could be an entire story unto herself. While her official occupation has her overseeing a medical billing company, Nelson’s attorney, Jovan Blacknell, painted a picture of a sophisticated career criminal who had been commanding the resources of a crime family for three decades. According to Blacknell, Alexander’s family included a crew specializing in the robbery of check-cashing businesses with a modus operandi that involved descending by rope through holes cut in the roof.
Thompson and the prosecution laid out the events surrounding Dupre’s murder, showing phone calls and text messages to demonstrate that Alexander did surveillance on Dupre’s shop beforehand. Messages between Alexander and her husband were obtained thanks to a wiretap from Ventura County sheriff’s detectives investigating the supposed robberies. According to the order of events laid out by the prosecution, on the night that Alexander planned to murder Dupre, her husband instead found himself in a ten-mile high-speed chase after detectives moved in to arrest him.
The prosecution says that after her husband’s arrest, Alexander continued to Dupre’s shop. Dupre was murdered that night, according to the prosecution, by a gunman who entered through the back of the shop and shot Dupre three times. While Alexander has pleaded guilty to her part in the murder, which seemed to include preparing a getaway vehicle that she left on 68th Street for the shooter’s use, the identity of the shooter has not been confirmed.
The money from the stolen equity has also not been recovered, pointed out Blacknell in Nelson’s defense, nor has any record been found of Nelson soliciting someone to conduct the murder. Thompson insists that this was a professional murder.
Dupre was found dead in his auto repair shop, which occupied a converted house on Florence Avenue, and nothing was stolen from him or the shop. Detectives who investigated the crime when it occurred in 2013 were stumped.
