GARDEN GROVE – from www.ocregister.com – A man arrested and charged with murdering a prostitute at a Garden Grove hotel is a gang member who has been deported to Mexico three times in the last decade, Garden Grove police said at a press conference this morning.

Cesar Gomez, 34, of El Monte, is scheduled to be arraigned on a murder charge Monday at West Justice Center.

He is accused of strangling Ashley Lilly, 24, of Inglewood, to death at the Crowne Plaza Anaheim Resort on Harbor Boulevard some time late Aug. 20 or early Aug. 21.

Lilly checked into the hotel Aug. 19 for a weekend of “outcall prostitution activities,” Chief Joseph Polisar of the Garden Grove police said, and was found dead by hotel staff the morning of Aug. 21.

Lilly had been severely beaten in the face and choked by hand, and her room had been ransacked, police said. She had not been sexually assaulted, police said.

DNA material found at the scene of the crime matches samples of Gomez’s DNA entered into a federal database, Polisar said.

Gomez was convicted of attempted murder in 1993 and sentenced to 13 years in prison, Capt. Mike Handfield said.

When he was released in January 2001, he was deported to Mexico. He was arrested two months later and spent more than two and a half years in state and federal prisons on parole and immigration violations, Handfield said.

A few months after his release – on June 15, 2004 – he was arrested and deported again.

In January 2006, Gomez was arrested on charges of false citizenship papers. He was convicted of the charge in March 2006, spent two years in prison, and was deported in March 2008.

“We arrest these criminals, the DA does a good job prosecuting them, but beyond that our system is overwhelmed and broken,” Polisar said. “Our borders are like revolving doors for these criminals. It’s like sweeping back the ocean with a whisk broom.”

The California Department of Justice notified the Garden Grove Police Department Sept. 8 of the DNA match, and detectives went to work tracking Gomez down, Handfield said.

Gomez used several identities because of his multiple deportations, Handfield said, but a Social Security number he was using was associated with an Artesia address in a database search.

Detectives staked out the Artesia address for two days, and by Wednesday evening, were reasonably sure they had found Gomez, but not entirely so, Handfield said, because Gomez looks like his brother, and their most recent photograph of him was three years old.

So more detectives were sent to Gomez’s brother’s workplace to follow him.

The plan was for a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy to make a traffic stop on Gomez and run his fingerprints, since their squad cars are outfitted with fingerprint scanners, Handfield said.

When Gomez was stopped Thursday morning, he claimed to be his brother, and two friends in the car backed up his story, police said. The fingerprint equipment in the squad car didn’t work, but detectives were able to identify him by his tattoos, Handfield said.

Now that detectives have identified their suspect, they have to go back through the case and find other evidence linking Gomez to the crime.

After Lilly was killed, detectives examined her phone and internet records to find clients who had come to visit her, Polisar said.

They then interviewed the clients to start eliminating suspects.

Police declined to say what type of genetic material it was, or where in the hotel room it was found, saying it might hurt the prosecution’s case.

The fact that the Crowne Plaza is a “nice hotel” that’s frequently cleaned makes it a “pretty sterile environment” for evidence collection, Handfield said.

Other police departments are looking at Gomez to see if he may be involved in unsolved crimes, Handfield said.

“This doesn’t just happen one time,” Handfield said.