8 days after mobster was killed, his wife was too. Now his niece faces charges

Eight days after Michael Torres, a Mexican Mafia member known as “Mosca,” was killed in prison in 2023, a woman he referred to as his wife was gunned down.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Stephanie Rodriguez — shot at point-blank range in the San Fernando house of Torres’ late mother — raised questions of whether she’d been targeted in a wider campaign against her partner.

Law enforcement authorities considered Torres, 59, the most powerful Mexican Mafia member in the San Fernando Valley and a key figure behind Los Angeles County jail rackets occurring at the time of his death on July 6, 2023.

Michael Torres, a member of the Mexican Mafia, was stabbed to death at a state prison in Sacramento in July 2023.

(California Department of Corrections)

The case took an even stranger turn when Torres’ niece was charged with killing the 38-year-old Rodriguez.

Some answers emerged at a recent preliminary hearing for Evelyn Torres, 35, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and possessing a gun as a felon. Based on testimony at Thursday’s hearing, it appears Rodriguez was not the victim of a mob hit but may have been involved in a personal dispute that spiraled into violence.

Det. Cary Bell of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department testified that Evelyn Torres was distraught over her uncle’s death when she got into an argument with Rodriguez in the early-morning hours of July 14, 2023.

The women were at the home of Michael Torres’ late mother on Kewen Street. The house had served as more than a haven for his mother: When Torres was last out of prison around 2005, detectives searched the two-bedroom stucco house and found $6,000 stuffed inside a coffee pot and $11,000 hidden in the crawl space, according to search warrant records.

After Michael Torres’ mother died in 2020, both Rodriguez and Evelyn Torres had moved in. But amid their fight on the night of her death, Rodriguez began packing up her belongings to move out, a witness testified. According to the witness, whose name wasn’t disclosed in court, Rodriguez told Evelyn Torres she needed to leave as well.

Evelyn Torres got mad, the witness said. “I remember her saying something about ‘the family home.’”

Rodriguez was still alive when the witness left around 1 a.m.

An unnamed person called police at 3:16 a.m., according to a search warrant affidavit. The officers found Rodriguez in the living room. Blood had pooled around the recliner she was sitting in, Bell testified. Stippling on her face meant she’d been shot at close range, the detective said.

A coroner’s investigator noted a tattoo behind her left ear — a fly. Her partner’s nickname, “Mosca,” means fly in Spanish.

Reviewing the home’s surveillance footage, Bell testified it had captured the sound of gunshots at 1:33 a.m.: five in rapid succession, a pause, then two more.

The cameras then showed a woman who resembled Evelyn Torres leaving the house, the detective said.

It wasn’t clear why police weren’t alerted until 90 minutes later.

Arrested at noon that same day, Evelyn Torres waived her Miranda rights and admitted killing Rodriguez, Bell testified. She claimed she fired only after Rodriguez punched her in the face, the detective said.

“She was upset about the death of her uncle,” Bell recalled.

It remains unclear why Michael Torres, who was serving 133 years to life for attempted murder, conspiracy, weapons offenses and witness tampering, was stabbed to death by two inmates at California State Prison, Sacramento.

Law enforcement sources said Torres, who had a fifth-grade education, developed schemes that extracted tens of thousands of dollars a month from the Los Angeles County jail population.

Using contraband cellphones from his prison cell, Torres oversaw a black market for extorted commissary goods called the “kitty.” He also arranged for drugs to be smuggled into the county lockups, where they could be sold for 20 times their street value, according to evidence presented in cases brought against his underlings.