Killer targeted men on Grindr, police say. One lived to help catch him

When his girlfriend took off the handcuffs, the man thought it was consensual sex.

She consented to have her wrists cuffed and her ankles tied together. Then the other man pulled out a baseball bat.

The Feb. 22 incident described in a detective affidavit began on Grindr, a hookup app for gay men. This ended with the handcuffed man seriously injured – but he survived.

Detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department said that with his cooperation, they identified the alleged attacker as Rockim Prowell, 34, and suspected this was not the first time he had used Grindr to entrap a victim.

Authorities said Prowell was accused of killing two people in September whose deaths went unsolved for years.

“We had to connect the dots,” said Det. Ray Lugo of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Prowell has not yet entered a plea to charges of murder, attempted murder, carjacking, robbery, theft and assault. His attorney, Deputy Public Defender Carlos Bido, did not respond to a request for comment.

Authorities say the trail of evidence that led detectives to Prowell began in 2021, when a married father of five left home at 1 a.m. to go on a date with a man he met online.

Inglewood police officers found Miguel Angel King’s white Toyota CHR parked on Queen Street on the afternoon of July 22, 2021. The hatchback area of ​​the vehicle was covered in blood, Lugo said.

King, 51, was reported missing days ago by his wife and children, Lugo said.

King, a Tijuana native who came to Los Angeles as a child, raised five children, including three girls she adopted from foster care, her daughter Angela King said. She said she worked hard, running a childcare business and helping her sister at her burger restaurant.

While the family waited for news, Angela King said she tried to convince herself that her father had gone on an unannounced vacation.

“I didn’t know what to think,” he recalled. “I was scared. My father was home every night, every day.”

Lugo and his partner, Det. Leo Sanchez examined King’s phone data and learned that the phone was last active near a lagoon in Playa del Rey. Sheriff’s divers searched the water but found nothing.

On Aug. 14, 2021, police found a decomposed body in the Angeles National Forest above Glendora, Lugo said. Two weeks later, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the remains as King’s. The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head.

Later the case went cold.

An LAPD detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit that Robert Gutierrez left his home in South Los Angeles on the evening of Aug. 21, 2023. He told his nephew he was going to meet someone he met on Grindr.

Founded in 2009, Grindr is a publicly traded company that currently has more than 14 million users in 190 countries and territories.

In a written statement, a Grindr spokesperson said the company is cooperating with law enforcement and encourages people to use the video calling feature to verify connections for safety before meeting in person.

“We take our role as a connector for the queer community seriously and work diligently to provide a safe environment for our users,” the spokesperson said.

Police around the world have investigated murders in which killers met their victims on Grindr. Authorities in London investigated the deaths of four men who were drugged, raped and murdered by a suspect they met on Grindr in 2014 and 2015, the BBC reported.

In 2023, a Scottish father of two was murdered by a 19-year-old young man he met on Grindr. His family learned of his double life only after Paul Taylor’s death.

“I will never have the opportunity to hear from Paul about his lifestyle choices, but I’m not judging him,” his widow told the court, according to the BBC.

Two days after Gutierrez left home, her nephew reported her missing.

LAPD detectives searched seized records and city license plate readers for Gutierrez’s black Infiniti FX35 and found nothing, according to the search warrant affidavit. Bank records showed someone used the credit card to pay the $132.60 monthly rent for a warehouse in San Bernardino.

When detectives obtained a court order to search Gutierrez’s Grindr account, they found he was planning to meet someone at an apartment on Imperial Highway in Inglewood, according to the affidavit.

The man’s name: Rockim Lee Prowell.

Prowell had a modest criminal record, but nothing to suggest violence. Detectives from the Beverly Hills Police Department arrested him in 2021 for burglary and theft, according to his probation report.

Last year police were alerted to a trespasser at a vacant five-bedroom house. A shattered sliding glass door and two televisions were missing, the parole report said. According to the report, a real estate agent showing a $19 million, 7,500-square-foot home in April 2021 found the property had been burglarized and three televisions had been stolen.

Detectives identified the suspect’s car from surveillance footage as a black Toyota Prius. The suspect in the video appeared to be a white man with long curly brown hair, according to a law enforcement source who was not authorized to discuss the incident publicly and asked to remain anonymous.

Two weeks later, Beverly Hills officers spotted the Prius at Lexington Road and Beverly Drive, according to the probation report. A stolen license plate was attached to the car.

Prowell was behind the wheel. Inside the car, detectives found a brunette wig and a plastic mask resembling a white male, which the law enforcement source said looked realistic enough to be “movie quality.”

According to the parole report, Prowell, who is black, admitted to burglarizing homes in Beverly Hills. He was homeless and said he was “going through a hard time.”

Prowell told police he searched for properties listed for sale knowing they would be vacant and robbed them for televisions he was selling online. He said because of his background in the construction industry, he knew that turning off home circuit breakers would disable surveillance systems.

The law enforcement official said Prowell was linked to burglaries in North Hollywood, Van Nuys, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, South Pasadena and Newport Beach, but there is no record of him being charged for those alleged crimes.

Prowell, charged with burglary, grand larceny and vandalism in Beverly Hills, was released on bail on May 6, 2021. Four months later, he pleaded no contest to two counts of burglary and one count of grand larceny.

When it came to Prowell’s sentence, a parole officer wrote that his “callous and deliberate” crimes would have continued had he not been caught. However, Prowell, who had no previous criminal record, was entitled to probation.

The judge accepted the officer’s recommendation not to include prison time and sentenced Prowell to two years of probation.

Authorities claim that by then Prowell had already killed.

Around 3 a.m. on Feb. 22, 2025, LAPD officers raced to 59th Place in South Los Angeles, where they were dispatched for a report of “unknown trouble,” a detective said in a search warrant affidavit.

They found a 40-year-old man with a broken leg, according to the affidavit and a statement from the L.A. District Attorney’s Office. The man, whose name was not mentioned in the indictment, told the police a sad story.

After messaging on Grindr for months, she and a guy made plans to meet for the first time. His girlfriend, whose name he does not know, sent him an address. When the man arrived, she said, she allowed herself to be handcuffed and her ankles tied, thinking they would have consensual sex.

Instead, she said, her boyfriend pepper-sprayed her, beat her with a metal stick, and demanded the PIN code for her bank cards. The suspect, who covered his eyes with tape, taped his mouth with a sock, and taped his mouth, threatened to put the man in the trunk and dragged him into a car.

The man said he managed to free his legs and ran out the garage door, screaming.

The suspect, identified by police as Prowell, started the car and hit the man, breaking his leg. The man got out of the car and tried to persuade the victim to get inside, even removing the handcuffs, the affidavit said.

Instead, the victim started running and asked his neighbor to call the police. By the time officers arrived, the suspect, allegedly Prowell, had disappeared.

Court records show the victim remembered his girlfriend’s Grindr username and detectives obtained a search warrant for the company.

It’s unclear how detectives identified Prowell as the suspect, but Lugo said the surviving victim’s statement was the break authorities needed.

“Our case was a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Lugo said.

When detectives searched a home linked to Prowell in Inglewood, they found Gutierrez’s Infiniti in the garage, according to a statement from the LA District Attorney’s Office. His body has still not been found.

Prosecutors last month charged Prowell with murdering King and Gutierrez and attempting to kill the third victim, who described being tied up, attacked and hit by a car.

If convicted, Prowell faces life in prison without parole or the death penalty, prosecutors said in a statement. The district attorney’s office has not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty.

Angela King said she wants more to be known than how her father died.

He quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: “Judge not, lest you be judged. For with the judgment you pass you will be judged, and with the measure you use you will be measured.”