A California man was arrested and charged this week in connection with a spree of serial murders targeting Mexican sex workers, prosecutors say.
Bryant Rivera, 30, was arrested on Thursday in Los Angeles by U.S. Marshals and the FBI, according to a federal complaint obtained by The Daily Beast. The arrest comes at the request of Baja California’s Attorney General, who said Friday that Rivera is facing arrest warrants in connection with three “femicides” in Tijuana between September 2021 and February 2022.
Rivera “is considered a serial killer…[and]will now face justice in Baja California,” Baja California Attorney General Ricardo Iván Carpio Sánchez said in a Facebook statement. Previously, Sánchez said that investigators believed the suspect was similar to notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.
U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said that Rivera is placed in federal custody pending a Monday detention hearing before he is extradited to Mexico. His Los Angeles federal public defender did not immediately respond to a request for commen,t but his father told a local news outlet he was blindsided by the arrest news.
“We depend on him. He takes us to our doctor’s appointments, to the supermarket,” Candido Rivera told NBC Los Angeles.
The criminal complaint in Los Angeles details one of the three murders Rivera is accused of committing across the border.
Prosecutors allege that on Jan. 25, 2022, Mexican authorities received a report about a woman’s body found at the Hotel Cascada in Tijuana’s La Zona Norte. Inside the hotel, which was next to Hong Kong Gentlemen’s Club, authorities found Angela Carolina Acosta Flores’ body in the bathroom. An autopsy report later concluded that Flores died by asphyxiation.
Her mother told authorities that Flores was “working as a dancer, and on some occasions as a sex worker, at the Hong Kong bar,” the complaint states. Flores last texted her mother at around 10:12 p.m. on Jan. 24, stating that she was entering a hotel room “with a client for thirty minutes.” The next morning, Flores’ mother and her boyfriend went to the hotel to look for her and learned from a witness that the dancer was seen with a “male client with light brown complexion, an acne-scarred face, and a statue of approximately” of 5’5.
The witness added that she knew the client as Rivera and said that he was a “gringo,” the complaint states.
At the bar, investigators learned that Rivera had been with another sex worker the night of the slayings, but that they had returned shortly after “their liaison.” That same worker said they saw Rivera leave the bar with Flores shortly afterward, the complaint states. Prosecutors say that Rivera was then seen leaving the Hotel Cascadas room before midnight. He was later seen crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on foot about 13 minutes later at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.
While details of the other two cases are not immediately clear, Mexican authorities previously said that all three victims were found in hotel rooms and all had sex with the suspect before their deaths. On Friday, Carpio credited “scientific research” and a strong “collaboration to combat crime across borders,” to Rivera’s arrest.
“In Baja, California..nobody escapes justice,” he added.
