A rumor circulating online for several years claimed unused footage shot for comedian Larry David’s former HBO TV show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” helped to save a man charged with first-degree murder and from potentially facing the death penalty.
A Reddit post (archived) from Feb. 17, 2021, read, “‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Saved a Man from the Death Penalty.” The post featured a meme, reading: “Did you know? Juan Catalan spent nearly 6 months in jail for the murder of a teenage girl until his lawyer found unused footage from HBO’s ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ that proved he’d been at a Dodgers game with his 6-year-old daughter.” Other social media posts, videos and news articles repeated the claim in recent years, as well.
“Curb Your Enthusiasm” Saved a Man from the Death Penalty
byu/TonyLiberty inThatsInsane
Snopes’ investigation found the claim partly true: Unused footage from a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode indeed played a role in the exoneration of a man wrongly accused of murder, but according to the man’s attorney, records from three different phones played an even greater role.
What follows is an account of the events leading up to the release of that man.
Backstory
The story begins in early May 2003, when 16-year-old Martha Puebla testified at a court hearing involving two men charged with two murders in 2002. One of the men was Vineland Boys gang member Jose Ledesma. The other was Mario Catalan. Mario’s brother, Juan Catalan, the 24-year-old father of a young girl, watched the proceedings that day and listened to Puebla’s testimony. Alma Oseguera, Juan Catalan’s girlfriend, also attended the hearing in the courtroom.
After Puebla testified, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Detectives Martin Pinner and Juan Rodriguez misleadingly told Ledesma that Puebla had identified him as the perpetrator of the alleged murders. In fact, Puebla had done no such thing. (A jail-cell audio recording of a phone call not discovered until later, in January 2005, would reveal that Ledesma ordered a fellow gang member to kill Puebla.)
Days later, on the night of May 12, Puebla was shot and killed outside her Sun Valley home in San Fernando Valley. Earlier on the same night, Juan Catalan had attended a baseball game at Dodger Stadium with his young daughter, his cousin Miguel Catalan and a friend.
On Aug. 12, three months to the day later, Los Angeles police arrested Juan Catalan. Pinner and Rodriguez, the same detectives who interrogated Ledesma, interrogated Catalan, accusing him of Puebla’s murder. He spent 5 1/2 months in a maximum-security facility after being charged with murder.
Catalan’s lawyer, LA criminal defense attorney Todd Melnik, looked for evidence to help free his client. Since Catalan said he was at a baseball game on the night of the murder, Melnik visited Dodger Stadium to review the DodgerVision video captured for display on the venue’s big screens that night. He was unable to find footage clearly showing Catalan at the game.
Catalan told Melnik he remembered a film crew shooting something in the bleachers during the game. Melnik questioned the Dodgers’ front-office staff, who provided him with the phone number of a crew member of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Melnik explained the dire situation and received approval to visit the TV show’s offices and review footage shot at the stadium. With actor Larry David himself in the room, Melnik spotted unused footage clearly showing Catalan and his daughter at the stadium.
During a preliminary hearing, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Leslie Dunn listened to Melnik present evidence, including the “Curb” footage, of Catalan’s innocence, and dismissed his case.
In our outreach for this story, a person representing Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman, a prosecutor in Juan Catalan’s case, said she declined comment. We also contacted LAPD via its public information office and through a records request, as well as Pinner through an email address listed online, and will update this story if we receive any responses.
The Video Evidence
In a Jan. 2, 2025, phone call with Snopes, Melnik said the “Curb” episode aspect “certainly makes the case sexy,” having previously told The Associated Press in 2004 the footage “had extreme dramatic effect.” However, he told us “the most important thing were the cell tower records.”
After all, the unused TV show footage captured Catalan at Dodger Stadium not at the same time as Puebla’s murder, but rather around 1 1/2 hours prior to her killing. A cellphone tower record placed Catalan in the vicinity of the stadium around 20 to 30 minutes prior to the murder. Even so, Melnik told Snopes that Catalan dropped off his cousin, Miguel Catalan, at the latter’s home “right around the corner” from the site of the murder — within one to two minutes before the shooting.
Melnik contended his own investigative work — which combined locating the “Curb” footage, cellphone records from near Dodger Stadium, a call record from Miguel Catalan’s phone and recent call records stored in the memory of Puebla’s cordless home phone — ultimately led to the dismissal of what he called a “complicated” case. Many accounts of the story have failed to mention these factors, instead attributing Catalan’s case dismissal mainly to the “Curb” footage.
The Night of May 12, 2003
On May 12, 2003, the Los Angeles Times published a broadcast start time of 7 p.m. for the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium.
During the game, the “Curb” cast and crew shot scenes inside the 56,000-seat stadium for the fourth-season episode “The Car Pool Lane.” In the episode, Larry David — playing a character of the same name — picks up a prostitute in his car, portrayed by actor Kym Whitley, for the sole reason of being able to drive in the carpool lane to make it to the Dodgers game in rush-hour traffic.
The tickets Juan Catalan purchased for himself, his daughter, Miguel Catalan and a friend, placed them in one of only two sections where the “Curb” crew filmed most of the episode’s stadium scenes. In one scene, David interacts with Marty Funkhouser, played by the late actor Bob Einstein, in the same section.
Around 9 p.m., the TV show’s camera operators captured footage from at least two angles showing Juan Catalan and his daughter. The two portions of the clips did not make the final cut of the “Curb” episode. An article published by LAmag.com, a brief HBO documentary and a report from “60 Minutes Australia” placed the footage showing Juan Catalan and his daughter at the game occurring at varying times between 8:54 and 9:10.
The “Curb” footage truly captured Juan Catalan on video at the baseball game. However, the timecode on the footage indicated the murder happened around an hour and a half later.
The Braves and Dodgers entered the 9th inning tied at 4-4. The Braves pulled away in the final inning, scoring 7 additional runs to win 11-4. The Times’ recap displayed 27,458 tickets sold for the evening’s game. The number provided perspective regarding the game’s crowd size and amount of traffic involved when Juan Catalan, his daughter, Miguel Catalan and his friend departed the stadium.
According to the Times, which cited police, a shooter killed Puebla at 10:40 p.m. in the Sun Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles, specifically the 7600 block of Case Avenue. “60 Minutes Australia” also mentioned 10:40 as the time of the shooting.
The 2017 Netflix documentary “Long Shot” documented much of Juan Catalan’s case, including some of the details about the phone records. The documentary featured an archival interview clip with the previously mentioned Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman. LAmag.com reported Silverman’s nickname as “Sniper,” saying that at the time she had not yet lost a case. At the time of the dated interview, she argued that, regarding Catalan’s case, the “Curb” footage was good for “nothing.”
In our interview with Melnik, he added, “The [Netflix] documentary was supposed to be an hour and a half or an hour and 40 minutes long, and then Netflix bought it from the producers. And they said, ‘Look, we want to make this a 40-minute documentary because we want to submit it for the Emmys and for the Oscars, and it has to be under 40 minutes.’ So that’s why it’s 39 minutes and 59 seconds when you actually watch it on Netflix. They cut out a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, a whole bunch of stuff.”
The Phone Records
With the “Curb” footage merely placing Juan Catalan at the baseball game around an hour and a half prior to Puebla’s murder, Melnik knew he needed to find more evidence. He ended up locating three sets of phone records that ultimately led to the dismissal of the case.
On the night of the baseball game and Puebla’s murder, at 10:11 p.m., Catalan’s girlfriend, Oseguera, called his cellphone. Catalan picked up the call, connecting through a cellphone tower with around a one-mile radius that included Dodger Stadium. In the report from “60 Minutes Australia,” Catalan said, “Alma called me when I was leaving the stadium. I told her, ‘Oh, game’s over. We lost. I’m walking out of the stadium now.'” The record of the 49-second phone call placed Catalan in the vicinity of the stadium at the late-night hour.
Melnik — attempting to recount by phone a case from more than 21 years before — told us he believed Juan Catalan dropped off his cousin Miguel Catalan at his house “right around the corner from Martha [Puebla].” Miguel Catalan then called his girlfriend at 10:36 p.m. to let her know he arrived home. Melnik also said he believed the murder itself occurred at around 10:38, and knew he needed to find more evidence to help his client (we requested case records from Melnik and will update this story if we receive confirmation of this and other timings):
Now what’s very interesting and what the prosecutor tried to argue is that when we provided our cell phone records and and our witness, to the court, he, Juan, was actually literally a couple hundred feet away from the murder within a minute or two of the murder.
His cousin, I think it was his cousin, lived right around the corner from Martha [Puebla]. And [Juan Catalan] dropped him off, but went a different route, than to pass by her house. So they never heard any sirens or passed by anything that would indicate, you know, anything was going on. So she [the prosecutor] tried to argue, well, by his own account, he was within a block or two of the murder scene at the time of the murder.
Well, the issue then became my investigation that LAPD didn’t do.
Melnik’s Investigation: Puebla’s Cordless Home Phone
In defense of Juan Catalan, Melnik recounted to us the details of what occurred in the minutes prior to Puebla’s death, including a black Chevy Malibu circling the block and a fight occurring between Puebla and another girl. At the same time these events transpired, Catalan departed the baseball stadium in a differently colored Chevy Tahoe around the time of his 10:11 p.m. phone call with his girlfriend. Melnik specifically mentioned how the Puebla family’s cordless home phone played a key role in locating witnesses:
[Martha Puebla] was on [a cordless home] phone while she was outside prior to the murder. That phone has a memory of the last 10 phone numbers called. And so I looked at the 10 phone numbers that were on there. LAPD never called any of those numbers, but I did. And the last phone number called was to a guy that had just gotten out of prison that was talking to Martha, and he heard the fight between Martha Puebla and the other female. I do not remember her name at this point.
They got into it, calling each other b****es and and all kind of stuff. But that phone call, which lasted about, I think, 10 minutes or so, helped me to show, that my client had not been there in that location during that period of time. Because the other witnesses, the other boys that were there with this girl, I was able to track all of them down even though LAPD hid their identities and their personal identifying information, like, where they lived from me.
I went with my investigator, and we were looking for these people. And we found, we found all three of them, actually. And we talked to them. And they said, “Yeah. We’d been out there for about 20 or 30 minutes. And Martha and this girl got into a fight.” And during this period of time, there was a Chevy Malibu that kept driving around the block, twice, and then it parked across, like, just on the intersection, down, like one house.
And then as soon as all the kids left, there was that one eyewitness, Juan Ibanez. And Juan [Ibanez] testified that somebody got out of that black Malibu, Chevy Malibu, with four tinted windows and came up to Martha and said, or didn’t say, anything. And then Martha said, “Hey. I know you.” And then the kid said, “No, you don’t,” and then shot her in the face and then shot her in the leg. Meanwhile, Juan Ibanez turned and ran, dropped his cell phone, [and a shooter] shot at Juan Ibanez but missed. And that’s how the cops found Juan Ibanez … from that cell phone.
So by putting together all this timeline of people, it was impossible for Juan [Catalan] to have been on scene and been in the Chevy Malibu.
Catalan’s Settlement, Ledesma Revelations and ‘What if?’
In March 2007, the Los Angeles City Council agreed to a settlement of $320,000 in a police-misconduct lawsuit filed on behalf of Catalan. The suit alleged false arrest, false imprisonment, negligence and defamation. Melnik told us he recalled Catalan “didn’t get much of that” settlement amount since most of it paid for fees for the preliminary hearing.
On Jan. 28, 2008, the Los Angeles Daily News reported a judge sentenced Vineland Boys gang member Ledesma to life in prison after he pleaded guilty to a series of crimes, including ordering Puebla’s death. The news followed another report naming other suspects accused of collaborating with Ledesma in the slaying.
Months later, the Los Angeles Times published further details about the case, saying a compact disc with the jail-cell audio recording of Ledesma ordering Puebla’s death sat unheard in Detective Pinner’s desk. Had Pinner or Rodriguez — the two detectives who also wrongly pinned Puebla’s death on Juan Catalan — listened to the Spanish-language recording earlier and not solely relied on badly translated transcripts, Catalan’s arrest and jailing might never have occurred in the first place.
Then, on April 17, 2010, the Times reported a federal jury found both Pinner and Rodriguez “were negligent and violated [Puebla’s] constitutional rights when – as part of a ruse – they falsely told a gang member (Ledesma) that she had implicated him in a murder.” The same jury also found Puebla’s family partially at fault, with an attorney for the city claiming a prosecutor advised her family of the danger she faced while testifying as a witness, and offered them witness-relocation protection but turned it down. The family’s attorneys said they received no such offer of protection or relocation.
Melnik told us, “You know, if Juan had been home that night, and he had to have his mom testify that, ‘Oh yeah, he was home with me,’ Juan would be in prison today on death row because what happened was so heinous to a [16-year-old girl], to be a witness and [for her] to get shot and basically assassinated, [that no one would believe him or his mom].”
“It’s scary to think of what his life could have been.”
Editor’s Note: To learn more about this complex story, including the facts about the actions and interrogations regarding LAPD Detectives Martin Pinner and Juan Rodriguez, we recommend articles published by LAmag.com and the Los Angeles Times.