When his companion removed the handcuffs, the man thought it was consensual sex.
He agreed to have his wrists and ankles tied together. The other man then pulled out a baseball bat.
The Feb. 22 incident described in the detective's affidavit began on Grindr, a gay dating app. It ended with the handcuffed man severely wounded but alive.
With his cooperation, Los Angeles Police Department detectives said they identified the alleged assailant as 34-year-old Rokeem Prowell and suspected that this was not the first time he had lured a victim through Grindr.
Prowell was charged in September with killing two men whose deaths remained unsolved for years, authorities said.
“We needed to connect the dots,” said Det. Ray Lugo of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Prowell has not yet pleaded guilty to murder, attempted murder, carjacking, robbery, burglary and assault. His lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Carlos Bido, did not respond to a request for comment.
The trail of evidence that led detectives to Prowell began in 2021, when the married father of five left home at 1 a.m. to go on a date with a man he met online, authorities said.
Inglewood Police officers located 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 by his wife and children several days earlier, Lugo said.
A Tijuana native who came to Los Angeles as a child, King raised five children, including three girls he adopted from foster care, said his daughter Angela King. He worked long hours, ran a child care business and helped his sister with a hamburger restaurant, she said.
As the family waited for news, Angela King said she tried to convince herself that her father had simply taken an unannounced leave of absence.
“I didn’t know what to think,” she recalled. “I was scared. My dad was home every night, every day.”
Lugo and his partner Det. Leo Sanchez looked at King's phone data and learned that he was last active near the lagoon in Playa del Rey. Sheriff's divers searched the water but found nothing.
On Aug. 14, 2021, police discovered a decomposed body in the Angeles National Forest above Glendora, Lugo said. Two weeks later, the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner identified the remains as those of King. The cause of death was a single shot to the head.
Then things came to a standstill.
Robert Gutierrez left his South Los Angeles home on the evening of Aug. 21, 2023, an LAPD detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit. He told his nephew that he met someone he bumped into on Grindr.
Launched in 2009, Grindr is now a publicly traded company with 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 its video calling feature to test connections for security purposes before meeting in person.
“We take our role as a liaison to the queer community seriously and work hard to provide a safe environment for our users,” the spokesperson said.
Police around the world are investigating murders where the killers met their victims on Grindr. In London, authorities were investigating the deaths of four men in 2014 and 2015 who were drugged, raped and murdered by a suspect they met on Grindr, the BBC reported.
In 2023, a Scottish father of two was murdered by a 19-year-old he met on Grindr. It was only after Paul Taylor's death that his family learned of his double life.
“I will never have the opportunity to hear from Paul about his lifestyle choices,” his widow said in court, according to the BBC, “but I don’t judge him.”
Two days after Gutierrez left home, his nephew reported him missing.
According to the search warrant, LAPD detectives searched seizure logs and city license plate readers for Gutierrez's black Infiniti FX35 but found nothing. His bank records showed someone used his credit card to pay the $132.60 monthly rent for a storage unit in San Bernardino.
When detectives obtained a court order to check Gutierrez's Grindr account, they saw that he was planning to meet someone at an apartment complex on Imperial Highway in Inglewood, according to the affidavit.
Man's name: Rockim Lee Prowell.
Prowell had a modest criminal record, but nothing to indicate violence. Beverly Hills Police Department detectives arrested him in 2021 for burglary and theft, according to probation records.
Last year police were alerted to an intruder at the vacant five-bedroom house. They found a broken sliding glass door and two televisions missing, the probation report states. According to the report, in April 2021, a real estate agent showing a 7,500-square-foot home valued at $19 million arrived to find the property had been broken into and three televisions stolen.
Based on surveillance footage, investigators identified the suspect's vehicle as a black Toyota Prius. The suspect in the video was identified as a white man with long, curly brown hair, said a law enforcement source who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and requested anonymity.
Two weeks later, Beverly Hills officers spotted the Prius at Lexington Road and Beverly Drive, the probation report states. The vehicle was equipped with a stolen license plate.
Prowell was driving. Inside the car, detectives found a brunette woman's wig and a rubber mask resembling a white man, which a law enforcement source said looked realistic enough to be “movie quality.”
Prowell, a Black, admitted to burglarizing homes in Beverly Hills, according to his probation report. He was homeless and “had fallen on hard times,” he said.
He looked for properties for sale, knowing they would be empty, and stole them for televisions, which he sold online, Prowell told police. With a background in construction, he said he knows that tripping circuit breakers in homes will disable surveillance systems.
A law enforcement official said Prowell has been 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 with those alleged crimes.
Charged with burglary, grand theft and vandalism in Beverly Hills, Prowell 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 theft.
When it came to the sentence Prowell should have received, a probation officer wrote that his “callous and premeditated” crimes would have continued if he had not been caught. But with no prior criminal history, Prowell was eligible for probation.
The judge agreed with the officer's recommendation of no jail time and sentenced Prowell to two years probation.
By then, authorities say, Prowell had already been killed.
Around 3 a.m. on Feb. 22, 2025, LAPD officers rushed to 59th Place in South Los Angeles, where they had been dispatched to a report of an “unknown problem,” a detective wrote 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 Los Angeles County District Attorney. The man, who was not named in the affidavit, told officers a harrowing story.
After months of messaging on Grindr, he and the man planned to meet for the first time. His companion, whose name he did not know, sent him the address. When he arrived, the man said he allowed himself to be handcuffed and his ankles tied, thinking they were going to have consensual sex.
Instead, his partner pepper-sprayed him, beat him with a metal bat and demanded his bank card PIN, he told police. Blindfolding him, gagging him with a sock and taping his mouth shut, the suspect dragged the man to the car, threatening to put him in the trunk.
The man said that he managed to free his legs and run out of the garage screaming.
The suspect, identified by police as Prowell, started the car and crashed into the man, breaking his leg. He got out of the car and tried to coax the victim back inside, even removing the handcuffs, the affidavit states.
Instead, the victim took off running and asked a neighbor to call the police. By the time officers arrived, the suspect, identified only as Prowell, had disappeared.
The victim remembered his date's Grindr username, and detectives served the company with a search warrant, court records show.
It's unclear how detectives identified Prowell as a suspect, but Lugo said the surviving victim's story was the clue authorities needed.
“There was a lot of circumstantial evidence in our case,” Lugo said.
When detectives searched a home connected to Prowell in Inglewood, they found Gutierrez's Infiniti in the garage, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. His body has still not been found.
Last month, prosecutors charged Prowell with killing King and Gutierrez and attempting to kill a third victim, who said she was tied up, assaulted 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 her father to be known for more than just how he died.
She quoted the Gospel of Matthew: “Judge not, lest ye be judged. For with the judgment which ye pronounce ye shall be judged, and ye shall be judged; and with the measure that ye mete, it will be measured back to you.”
