RESEDA >> In the anatomy of solving a Los Angeles homicide, nothing helped break the case for West Valley Division police detectives better than the “butt call” from a fleeing gang member.

It was a cool, cloudy afternoon looking like rain in April 2013 when two brothers from a Los Angeles-area gang swaggered onto Cleveland Charter High School and challenged 18-year-old Kevin Orellana as he played handball.

One brother threw a punch, but the former Cleveland student got the upper hand. The younger brother then pulled a knife, jumped into the fray and stabbed him.

“Anthony’s shanked a fool in the neck,” the older brother said of his younger sibling, recorded during an unintentional cell phone call during the getaway. “Get down in the back seat,” his girlfriend driver told him as she and the killers peeled out of the parking lot.

• VIDEO: Students help solve brutal murder

For Los Angeles Police Detective John Doerbecker, the Orellana murder — solved in seven hours with the aid of social media — serves as a model case for witness bravery, media assistance, old-fashioned police work, police gang know-how and a new-found digital prowess in solving crime.

The posterior luck would also pack a powerful punch in court.

“The butt dial was huge,” recalled Doerbecker, who last February was appointed head of the LAPD West Valley Division Homicide Unit in Reseda. “How do you deny involvement when we have audio of the suspects’ voices talking about shanking someone, blood on the clothes and escape?

“This case: everything came together perfectly — cooperative witnesses, law enforcement working with the community and high-tech. It’s the age we live in.”

‘Value to society’

Behind a “LAPD Detectives: America’s Best” poster inside a corner upstairs office of the West Valley station, Doerbecker and his two partners, Detective James Filmore and Officer Matthew Kohl, man a homicide unit tasked with solving 30 unsolved murder cases from 1972 to Feb. 28, when 34-year-old Matthew Hanna was found shot to death inside his Lake Balboa home. Detective John Dunlop had worked with Doerbecker on the Orellana murder case.

Doerbecker, a 19-year Los Angeles Police Department veteran who has spent much of his police career in the San Fernando Valley, hails from a farm town in Ontario, Canada. The devout Christian had once planned on entering the ministry. But he found another calling in solving crime.

“I wanted to be of value to society,” said Doerbecker, a 48-year-old father of four with a Kojak-smooth head, close-set blue eyes and a penchant for crisp dress shirts above an LAPD shield pinned just to the right of his belt buckle. “To give back to the community.

“The Bible talks about, in Romans, of being a minister of justice, of government being there to benefit people. It’s our job to make sure justice is done. That’s our responsibility before God.”

Schooled by the renowned West Valley police detective Joel Price, who he replaced in February after Price retired, Doerbecker and his detectives follow a set of exacting gumshoe procedures he says are key to solving any case.

They include approaching each murder case with an open mind. Following the physical evidence: the sights, smells, fingerprints and traces of DNA at any crime scene. Listening to witnesses often frightened of retaliation, while establishing trust. Employing social media such as Facebook and Instagram. Being tenacious: never giving up on a case, even when it hits a wall. Never leaving a stone unturned. And having a solid police partner “to divide and conquer.”

These skills have helped warm a number of cold cases going back to the 1980s — with fresh leads, fresh evidence, fresh witnesses and even fresh fingerprints — of which more than a half dozen are close to being solved. “In the 1980s (detectives) didn’t keep notes like we do,” said Doerbecker, whose police reports read like detailed monographs. “It’s hard to know what’s been done. Sometimes it feels like you’re reworking an entire case.”

Schoolyard homicide

These skills were also what last January helped convict Michael Steven “Lil Loco” Carpio, 20, of Panorama City, and his 18-year-old brother “Baby Loco” Anthony Carpio. Each was found guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Kevin Orellana. Michael was sentenced to 15 years to life; his brother Anthony, who was 16 when he pulled the knife, got 16 years to life.

Michelle Pineda, 21, was sentenced Nov. 4 to two years in county jail after pleading no contest to one count of felony accessory for driving the getaway minivan and knowledge of a crime.

It was in the late afternoon of April 24, 2013, that the Carpio brothers — known on campus as “the Rockwoods” for their membership in a Rampart-area street gang of the same name — went to pick up their 15-year-old brother George, a Cleveland High student.

The brothers had been raised in Los Angeles, where they’d been jumped into one of the notorious Rockwood Street gangs of the Westlake area of Central Los Angeles. Their parents moved the family to Panorama City in order to escape the clutches of gang life, Doerbecker said. One or both assailants may have also once attended Cleveland High, students said.

That’s where they spotted Orellana, who had graduated from the Reseda high school a year before and still liked to play handball on campus after school with friends. The 18-year-old gym buff, dubbed “La Pulga” — the flea — for his small stature and lightning speed as a soccer goalie, had been studying at the West Valley Occupational Center in Woodland Hills to complete his high school degree.

He lived with his parents in North Hollywood. His family said he’d hoped to become a rapper. His back-up plan was to enroll at Cal State Northridge’s noted kinesiology program.

Though Orellana sported a shaved head and numerous tattoos, he had always shunned anything to do with gangs, Doerbecker and family members said. But the Carpios challenged him as a potential gang rival.

“Where you from?” the elder Carpio demanded, “hitting up” Orellana.

“I’m not from anywhere,” Orellana said, as the Cleveland football team practiced on a nearby field. “I’m not in any gang.”

The 5-foot-9 gang member threw the first punch. But the shorter and lighter Kevin soon got the best of him, according to police. The elder Carpio went down. Then his younger brother pulled a black-handled knife from his front pants pocket and stabbed Orellana twice in the chest.

Someone screamed: “He’s been stabbed!”

The brothers fled, the Cleveland football team in hot pursuit toward the parking lot, but got away in a maroon minivan.

Orellana, rushed to Northridge Hospital Medical Center, died at 5:01 p.m. Doctors found one knife wound deep enough to pierce his heart.

Following the leads

The crime scene was secured. Doerbecker rolled in. In an 8 ½-by-11 binder, he noted the specific details of the handball court. He noted the weather. He noted the pile of bloody clothes from the victim’s body, cut off by Los Angeles firefighters. And he took down a blood trail and red stains in the asphalt, from which swabs and photographs were taken.

“It appeared to me as blood that was possibly spit out potentially by one of the suspects as they fled,” he wrote in his report. “This was based primarily on the blood pattern that suggested to me that there was some aspiration associated with its formation.”

And he jotted down much more, including the water bottle of a teacher who had given aid to the former student. Most importantly, he described a line of student witnesses waiting to give priceless — and risky — testimony.

“This is when the story gets good,” recalled Doerbecker. “These kids stayed on campus. They waited for us to arrive. They knew it was a gang case. And they knew the suspect was a gangster; they knew they faced retaliation.

“And yet they waited for the cops to arrive.”

One student said he had heard one suspect had a large “LA” Dodgers tattoo on the right side of his head, a mark often seen on someone walking through Cleveland High. He didn’t know his name, but knew he may have been in the Rockwood gang. “I think I know the bad guy,” he told police.

He then went onto Instagram and pulled up the photo of the murder suspect, a self-satisfied-looking snap of a man holding a UV Vodka bottle. It would help the LAPD Gang Impact Team identify him as Michael Carpio, whom Doerbecker recognized as a survivor of a 2012 shotgun blast.

A family friend soon told police of the butt call, which revealed the in-flight conversation that took place among Michael and Anthony Carpio and Pineda, who ordered the brothers to hide in back. A digital copy was made of the voicemail.

A Spanish-language TV station provided links to recorded YouTube interviews of witnesses who heard Anthony say, “I stabbed Kevin,” Doerbecker said.

After the murder, Pineda, Michael Carpio’s girlfriend, drove them to Santa Monica, where they picked up Michael and Anthony’s mother and went for a round of shopping at a mall, Pineda later testified. They then changed clothes in the back of the van.

Detectives didn’t know where the Carpios lived. But through school records, police soon tracked the wanted trio to an apartment in Panorama City, where they were arrested around midnight when they returned home. The murder weapon was never found. The brothers would later plead not guilty in the stabbing death.

When interviewed by police, Michael Carpio accused Orellana of “mad-dogging” him, or giving him a threatening look. He said he wouldn’t have let his brother in the car if he’d known he’d been armed. When asked if Anthony had stabbed Orellana, he said he didn’t know, but that his little brother wasn’t the same anymore and that juvenile prison camp had changed him, according to police records.

Anthony Carpio initially denied going to Cleveland High that day, but then admitted to being on campus while denying being involved in a fight.

When asked directly why he stabbed the victim, police said he shook his head back and forth and shrugged his shoulders. When asked what that meant, his response was, according to Doerbecker’s report, “I don’t know.”

‘Our hearts are broken’

Two years after Orellana’s death, family, friends and associates still recall the happy-go-lucky young man popular with kids at school and a handsome hit with the ladies. “Our hearts are broken and we are absolutely devastated,” said a family statement on a memorial Facebook page.

“That kid was in my class, in 10th and 11th grades,” said Damian C. Goodman, assistant principal of Cleveland High, where one teacher objected to further media coverage of an event she said had deeply traumatized students. “I talked with him two weeks before. He was talking about turning his life around.

“He was popular, the kids knew him. After (the murder happened), a lot of kids stepped up.”

He said the school’s Black Student Union had stepped up to host a meeting on campus centered on violence.

In a small home south of Victory Boulevard, the Orellana household serves as a tribute to a beloved son, the second of three children. On a recent day, Orellana’s favorite soccer team, FC Barcelona, aired on a large-screen TV. A small room in back is exactly like he left it — his bed still tightly made, his LA Dodgers and other caps neatly lined up in a drawer, his favorite stickers still plastered by the door.

Except, memorial items have been added: a gold-dipped rose from his funeral, his bronze baby shoes, his Air Max Nikes and Dallas Cowboys ball cap and cologne, enshrined in glass cases, his photo collages that charted a boy with his dog to a young man who 10 days before his death had been proud to sign up for adult school classes. A memorial banner signed by his numerous friends read: “Gone but not forgotten,” and, “I see you again my boy. Save me a spot up there.”

An indigo urn with classical pediments, etched with “Rest in Paradise,” contains Kevin Orellana’s ashes.

This was a kid whose dad had bought him a Kia car, but who insisted he take the daily bus across the Valley to Cleveland High, or to his gym in Northridge, because “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” he’d said. He would learn to drive, he’d said, after he earned his high school degree.

This was the kid who, born in Sylmar, proudly told everyone — even his scrapbook, titled “Respect to be Respected” — that he was a native like his family from El Salvador. Who loved his mother’s pupusas. Who gave when he could. Who, always laughing, always cracking jokes, had been a go-to person for advice from his friends.

When he was killed, the family had 100 memorial T-shirts made. When they ran out, they made 50 more. When those ran out, they ordered up another 50. Claudia Orellana, his mother, said she couldn’t bear to talk about her beloved son.

“It’s emptiness,” said his other brother Timothy, who founded his own media company and who now drives his brother’s car with a memorial tribute in the back window. “He’s (the) guy who was supposed to go on all my business trips. My goal to succeed is to (fulfill) the promise I made to Kevin: to buy Mom and Dad a house.”

“I always told him, be careful (around gangs). Just keep walking. That was my advice,” said Pedro Orellana, Kevin’s father, an auto technician who used to drive him each day to the bus stop. A month after Kevin died, he was supposed to introduce his son to El Salvador. “(Now) I can’t see my son’s picture. It just breaks me up, because we were too-too together.

“As a family, we don’t talk about how we feel. In every private corner we cry, we get emotional. People say, as time passes, it’ll get better,” he said. “But it doesn’t. It gets worse, because when everything is quiet and empty, we break down.”