Crime Weekly - S3 Ep195: Crime Weekly News: Man Caught With Human Leg & Officer Jonathan Diller Remembered

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Police in Kern County, California arrested 28-year-old Rosendo Tellez on March 22, 2024 after they were called to the Amtrak station in Wasco after a person had been hit by a northbound train. Tellez reportedly was hiding one of the severed legs of the victim under his sweater. We also want to remember NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller, 31, who was tragically shot and killed while confronting repeat offender, Guy Rivera, 34. Rivera was a passenger in a vehicle when he was approached by Officer Diller and an argument ensued. Rivera would then shoot Officer Diller in the stomach under his bulletproof vest, killing him. Rivera already had 21 separate arrests according to authorities, 9 of them being felonies. Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod  

Hey everyone, welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derek Levasseur. And I'm Stephanie Harlow. And we're going to be talking about an incident tonight involving a video that's been circling the internet. I actually saw it as soon as it came out. It's, I don't advise you looking at it. It's pretty gross, but it's definitely something we want to discuss tonight. We want to cover the stuff that's in the headlines.

This is definitely one of those stories. So police in Kern County, California arrested 28-year-old Rosendo Tellez on March 22nd, 2024, after they were called to the Amtrak station in Wasco after a person had been hit by the northbound train. Tellez was reportedly hiding one of the severed legs of the victim under his sweater when law enforcement arrived. I will say, and we were talking about it before we started recording, I think everyone or a lot of you have seen the video where I thought it was dash cam footage, but maybe it was a construction worker, like you said. But you can almost see Tellez holding something.

You can't tell exactly what it is, but some people were alleging that he was actually eating the leg. And then you were saying that he was just putting it up to his face. Well, they said, listen, let's not get into it yet. But yeah, they don't know if he was like kissing it or licking it or I don't know. Definitely from the video, you can see that he's kind of he's hoarding it. Like he's like hiding the leg. Yeah, like Golem, like my precious. Yeah, like a dog hiding a bone. And I'm not saying that to be funny.

That's actually what he was doing. It was very odd. Yeah, this is a weird one because Amtrak employees pointed Tellez out to law enforcement when the police arrived. Tellez was walking down the street with this object under his sweater. And then a deputy said he approached Tellez, unsure of whether he was the victim of the train collision or not. And that's when Tellez pulled the object out from under his sweater and, I guess, dropped it on the ground in front of the police officer. And this object turned out to be a left leg severed at the knee. Detectives reportedly obtained several videos of Tellez doing many things with the leg, such as cradling the foot and laughing at the person who was recording him. The police report states that Tellez claimed he

believed the leg was his, even though he looked down and realized that both of his feet were present. He also would pick the leg back up and he wanted to bring it with him to the hospital, but then people started yelling him and he got scared. He dropped it again, I guess. And then a construction worker on a site nearby had several videos of Tellez. This man said he saw Tellez hit the leg against a piece of construction equipment, which appeared to have blood on it. And in one video, Tellez apparently bent over at the waist. He was holding the leg near his face, and after standing up, he reportedly brought the leg to his face and touched it to his mouth. Once again, we don't know why. Was he giving it a kiss? Was he giving it a taste? Was he giving it a sniff? We don't really know. A little

snuggle, maybe, perhaps? You know, like a little Eskimo kiss? We don't know what he was doing, but just odd behavior. Another video reportedly showed Tellez waving the leg with his right hand and lifting it in the air like he was sort of like showing it off. He seemed very proud of this leg. Just incredibly bizarre. I mean, obviously, I think and I hope it goes without saying there's got to be some mental health issues here, right? Like, got to be, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a safe assumption. You know, we're not trying to make light of the situation. No, I mean, although, come on, this is just, it's like 2024.

What else? What else are we? Nothing even surprises me. We're sitting here in 2024 talking about the story where somebody takes a severed leg from an accident site and starts walking around with it like it's their baby. And we're talking about it, and we're supposed to do this with a straight face.

No, it's difficult. And it gives you an insight into what is out there because Tellez wasn't originally part of this whole incident. Well, I don't know, actually. Well, I mean, the person was hit by a train. I'm assuming more than likely he didn't listen okay listen so the actual victim of the train accident there's a little strange story as well okay there's a twist yeah so the conductor reportedly said he was in the front of the train

with the engineer and he saw someone slowly walking with their bike near the tracks the person the man who ended up getting hit by the train looked as if he was speaking to someone else behind him, and the conductor sounded the train horn many times, but the man never looked at or acknowledged the train, and he reportedly walked onto the happened. You were kind of right there when this accident happened. Was Tellez the person that this man walking on the tracks was talking. Yeah. Was someone pushed? Was someone forced to stay on? Who knows? So that is an interesting twist. And that does add another layer to this case because we could be talking about, I don't know, a potential homicide maybe. Maybe. I will say we have a train, a track that runs through my old jurisdiction. And these types of incidents happen more than you think.

They really do. Some accident, some intentional. But even in my city, which was only 1.2 square miles, very small. And we had a couple of these happen in my career, and they're not pleasant. I will say that. Humans do not win against trains, never. And it's exactly like you think it would be if a human was hit by a moving train. So you take that into consideration. We don't know the circumstances behind the victim. So obviously our thoughts are with the victim and their family, whatever the case turns out to be. It's obviously a tragic situation. We're looking at someone who potentially has their own set of circumstances going on where this was intentional, right? This was a suicide.

And if that's the case, that's just sad. And at worst, we're looking at something where Tellez could have potentially been involved with this death and may have contributed to it occurring in the first place, which could potentially explain why he was doing what he was doing. Was there a gratification there? Was he doing something to, I don't know, incentivize this person or prohibit this person from getting off the track leading to their death? And then the gratification after the fact was seeing these body parts. Because I will say, no person in their right mind is going to do what he was doing. We have the video footage to prove it.

I mean, this is a fresh body part. And you can imagine what that would be like. And this person, this Tellez, is playing with it. I mean, there's no other way to put it. I'm trying to be respectful about it. But there's really no other way to put it. If you haven't seen the video, it's not gross. You can't really see much. You can see that there's something he's holding.

And when you know what it is, it makes a lot more sense with some of the things you see. That's what I said. It's not gross because you can't really see it. But once you know what's in the video, it is gross. Yeah, it is gross, actually, when you're watching it. That's why we're not playing it in this. There ain't no reason for that. There ain't no point. If you want to to go see it you can come to your own conclusion but before we move on i found something the train conductor said according to the documents filed by the sheriff's investigators that the other person the victim was talking to was identified as rosendo telez and he stood about 20 feet away so i was wondering wondering, like, Rosendo Tellez, clearly not,

like, in his right mind. Was he scaring this guy on the bike? Was the guy on the bike feeling like he had to stay close to the train tracks because Rosendo Tellez was making him feel, like, fearful for his life? Was he yelling at him? Was he threatening him? And that's why the guy- Was he running from him? Was he trying to get away from him? Was he trying to get away from him? Right. You could have a manslaughter type thing here where we've seen it before where we had individuals, I think it was New York. They were fighting and one of the individuals fell off the middle section there onto the track and was killed. You could be responsible indirectly for someone else's death and still be charged.

So that makes much more sense. I wonder, to Les' background, are these two, in my experience, a lot of the times the people hanging out around the train tracks are people who are displaced or homeless. It looks like there's some drug charges in Tellez former drug usage, which contributes to what they're doing and why they're homeless. So you could have a situation here where you have two people who are not of sound mind. And for whatever reason, something happens. They got a rivalry or something maybe going on. Who knows? Or something's going on there where one's trying to steal something from the other.

They're trying to get away. There's so many things. I've seen sexual assaults. I've seen murders. I've seen larcenies. It's like they have their own sort of like society kind of like they kind of make their own rules. It's a little bit of a sort of lawless kind of, you know, every man for himself situation. And according to.

You see that down in like Tent City and stuff like that for sure. Oh yeah. According to this article, Tellez is homeless and has at least half a dozen prior misdemeanor convictions. Most are for drug or alcohol related offenses. Yeah. And so again, probably a totality of things going on with Tellez. And I would venture to say, have they released the victim's name yet? No, they said they don't really know who it is. They just said it was a man. They believe it was a man with goatee style facial hair.

Apparently. Hard to identify at this point. Yeah, the body was, yeah, when the police got there, they said there was body parts all over, basically. You know, like, and it was like, there's no person, there's no victim to save here. And the fact that nobody's come forward or a family hasn't come forward saying hey most likely an unhomed individual more than likely like yeah this is another homeless individual they could have been arguing they could have been messing around let's not always assume it's automatically malicious could have been something going on between them maybe they're playing chicken with the train tracks

it could be a lot of things but i'll be interested to see how it plays out at minimum based on what we have on video. Tellez needs to be somewhere where he can receive the medical attention he needs because it doesn't look like this was a homicide on the surface based on what you're saying. It doesn't look like that. So in the fact that Tellez was doing what he was doing with the victim's leg, he's not of sound mind. So would he even be able to stand a trial? More than likely not. So we got to get him to the proper people and speak for... This is a bigger issue, by the way, right? Like a lot of our homeless population who's not doing this could use some medical attention, but in this country, they're probably not going to get it. So that's a whole bigger issue.

But hopefully he gets the help he needs. If there's some level of criminal liability there and he's brought back to health where he could stand trial, well, then obviously he may be looking at an involuntary manslaughter charge, maybe. But I don't know based on what you said. He's got, it looks like four charges. Hold on. They said they're going to give him a public defender.

And he's got, apparently when he was before a judge, he was very polite. He was, you know, calm. There was no issues. So the man suspected of taking a severed body part from a crash scene, which he swung and possibly bit as he walked down a street in Waisco, made his first court appearance Tuesday. He's facing four misdemeanor counts, removing human remains from a location other than a cemetery, disposing of human remains outside of a cemetery, destroying or concealing evidence, and resisting a peace officer. Although

it looked like he went into custody pretty easily. He only ran away once. He only ran from the police once. I think that's pretty good considering he's walking around with a He only ran away once. He only ran from the police once. I think that's pretty good considering he was walking around with a severed leg only once. It's pretty good. Yeah. No, it's a tough one. And that's what we're dealing with. That's what police officers are dealing with.

And I do want to say one other thing before we go. It's not related to this story, but it is related to police officers. As many of you know, there was a tragic incident last week with Jonathan Diller, a police officer out in New York City. A lot of people are talking about it around the country. I think mainly, I mean, this is the 29th police officer killed this year alone. I think that people are only talking about this one because we get to see it on video. And just like what we're doing here, video just adds a whole different meaning to what we're experiencing because it's one thing to hear

the story. It's another thing to see it with your own eyes. And the really unfortunate and tragic part about this is it was completely preventable. I'm not even going to mention the scumbag's name who shot him, but he has been arrested, I want to say over 20 times, and he's been released time after time, multiple convicted felon who just keeps getting out because of the system that's currently in place. And because of that, he was allowed to do what he did to Officer Diller. There's a lot of politics around it. We're going to stay away from that. This is about the officer and this is about keeping us all safe.

Well, I live in New York, so I can speak a little bit on it. New York is terrible with crime and anyone who lives here who is a victim of crime or who is in the periphery of, you know, knowing victims of crime or dealing with the legal system here will tell you that New York has completely lost the plot when it comes to crime and criminals. I don't know. They've got they've got this whole catch and release thing going, which don't ask me why. I don't understand it, but I'm going through something not as drastic, obviously, but, you know, to have somebody be arrested over and over and over and over and over again for the same thing and then to have them continue getting released when it's like, what makes you think when there's no repercussions, when there's no, you know, even short term, like, yes, they're going to have to go to trial and, you know, whatever. But when there's no short term repercussions, what's to stop a person who seems to believe that the rules don't apply to them from offending again? Well, nothing. And I've talked to a lot of police officers this past month and said things like, you know, why isn't

this being rectified? Why isn't this being taken care of? And I've been told by more than one, you know, we've got murderers right now on house arrest. We can't even keep murderers behind bars right now. And half of them or most of them aren't aren't even taking the house arresting seriously. You know, they leave and then we got to go and get them and find them. And we bring them back to their house. We bring them back to we bring them to jail to process them, to give them another charge for leaving the house arrest. But then we put them right back in their house and nothing happens. So it is bad in New York State right now, I will say. And I'm sure when you look at the difference between someplace like upstate or New York City, it's probably a hundred times

worse in the city. Yeah, it's really bad. And New York is starting to develop a reputation for that. And I just want to make sure I'm accurate. It was 21 times. So this individual has been arrested 21 times. Nine of them were felonies. He was released from prison in September of 2021 after serving five years for the criminal sale of a controlled substance. He previously spent three years in a state prison for a 2011 assault and was released in October of 2014. It's crazy. But again, our thoughts and prayers are with Jonathan Diller and his wife and his one-year-old

son. Diller was only 31 years old. He's out there trying to keep all of us safe and, uh, he, he sacrificed his life, uh, for the rest of us. So we're definitely thinking about him and his family and, and nothing's going to help them at this point. Nothing's going to bring him back, but you know, we want them to know that we appreciate his service and everyone out there who's, who's doing it the right way and, uh, doing their best to protect us because it really is for the most part, a thankless job. And it's doing it the right way and doing their best to protect us because it really is, for the most part, a thankless job and it's dangerous out there. I can definitely

attest to that. And by no means is every officer a good guy. I've said that numerous times, so no one's going to call me out on that. But it does happen. And for the most part, I do think people go out there to do the right thing. And unfortunately, this is the situation we're in. But we're thinking about them for sure. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it's hard out there, man. I will say real quick, I was just about to wrap this up.

Hope you guys enjoyed the bloopers. That was part two that came out on YouTube. It's been out on Instagram. Shout out to Shannon for putting that together because it's not just her pulling those out of nowhere. She kind of curates them throughout the year, puts them aside, and then puts that whole masterpiece together with the music and the editing. She's great. So shout out to Shannon for doing that. And we'll continue to do it in the future. And for anyone who's not on Patreon, you guys got it well before everybody else. So that's the incentive right now with Patreon is those little things like that. Patreon members will get them first. Everyone else will get them

a little bit later, but there's going to be more incentives to get on Patreon as we go forward. We're still talking about some different things. So keep a lookout for that. But until next time, we will be back later this week with a new case. Are we not telling them right now? We're going to let them just find out. Yeah, we'll just let them find out. Let them find out. Everyone stay safe out there. We will see you later this week on audio and on YouTube on Sunday. Have a good night. Be safe. Bye.