The detectives assured his family over and over that they would catch the man who splashed gasoline on their homeless brother, John Robert McGraham, and set him ablaze on a Mid-Wilshire street corner last fall. But the man's brother, David McGraham, wasn't so sure.
"They said unequivocally, 'We'll get him,' " he said. "As time passed, I thought it wasn't going to happen. I just figured the killer got away with it."
Then, on Thursday afternoon, his sister Susanne McGraham-Paisley called him at his home in Washington state. She was sobbing as she told her brother that she had just heard from one of the Los Angeles Police Department detectives.
"They got him," she told her older brother.
Detectives arrested Benjamin Mathew Martin, 30, on suspicion of murder just before noon Thursday in Rancho Mirage. Witness identifications and DNA evidence left behind tied Martin to the killing, said Lt. Mark Tappan. But officials did not provide details on what led them to Martin.
Law enforcement sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is open, described Martin as a former barber in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood with a grudge against the homeless.
Martin is not believed to be a gang member, but he does have a previous criminal conviction for a drug offense. DNA taken from that conviction was tied to the October killing, the sources said.
"The attack occurred without any apparent provocation. The victim was totally helpless," said LAPD Chief William J. Bratton. "The suspect intentionally set the victim on fire and then ran from the scene, leaving a red plastic gasoline container."
LAPD Deputy Chief Charlie Beck said the alleged motivation for the killing appears to be "straight-up personal dislike."
The gruesome slaying of John Robert McGraham, 55, as he sat on his usual corner at 3rd and Berendo streets Oct. 9 galvanized the multiethnic, largely working-class neighborhood. Martin is Latino, as are the neighborhood people who regularly gave McGraham -- who was white -- food and clothes.
On that night, residents and shopkeepers found McGraham lying on his back in a nearby parking lot, his body still ablaze. They rushed to extinguish the flames, but were unable to save McGraham, whose clothes had been burned off.
The crime provoked widespread introspection about the dangers faced by homeless people in the state. Hundreds gathered for vigils at the corner that McGraham called home.
