When his date pulled out handcuffs, the man thought it was for consensual sex.
He submitted to having his wrists cuffed and ankles bound together. Then the other man pulled out a baseball bat.
The Feb. 22 incident, recounted in a detective’s affidavit, began on Grindr, a hookup app for gay men. It ended with the handcuffed man badly injured — but alive.
With his cooperation, detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department said, they identified his alleged assailant as Rockim Prowell, 34, and suspected it wasn’t the first time he’d lured a victim using Grindr.
Prowell was charged in September with killing two men whose deaths had gone 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 yet to enter a plea to charges of murder, attempted murder, carjacking, robbery, burglary and assault. His attorney, Deputy Public Defender Carlos Bido, didn’t return a request for comment.
The trail of evidence that led detectives to Prowell began in 2021, authorities say, when a married father of five left home at 1 a.m. for a date with a man he’d met online.
Inglewood police officers found Miguel Angel King’s white Toyota CHR parked on Queen Street the afternoon of July 22, 2021. The vehicle’s hatchback area, Lugo said, was covered in blood.
King, 51, had been reported missing by his wife and children days earlier, Lugo said.
A native of Tijuana 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 hard, running a child-care business and helping his sister with a burger restaurant, she said.
As the family waited for news, Angela King said she tried to convince herself that her father was just taking an unannounced vacation.
“I didn’t know what to think,” she recalled. “I was scared. My father was home every single night, every single day.”
Lugo and his partner, Det. Leo Sanchez, reviewed King’s phone data and learned it was last active near a 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 King’s. The cause of death was a single gunshot to the head.
Then the case went cold.
Robert Gutierrez left home in South Los Angeles the evening of Aug. 21, 2023, an LAPD detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit. He told his nephew he was meeting someone he’d encountered on Grindr.
Launched in 2009, Grindr is now a publicly traded company that claims more than 14 million users in 190 countries and territories.
In a written statement, a Grindr spokesperson said the company cooperates with law enforcement and encourages people to use its 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 homicides where killers met their victims on Grindr. In London, authorities investigated the deaths of four men in 2014 and 2015 who were drugged, raped and killed by a suspect they’d met on Grindr, the BBC reported.
In 2023, a Scottish father of two was killed by a 19-year-old he’d met on Grindr. Only after Paul Taylor’s death did his family learn of his double life.
“I will never have the opportunity to hear from Paul about his lifestyle choices,” his widow told a court, according to the BBC, “but I do not judge him.”
Two days after Gutierrez left home, his nephew reported him missing.
According to a search warrant affidavit, LAPD detectives searched impound logs and city license plate readers for Gutierrez’s black Infiniti FX35, finding nothing. His bank records showed someone had used his credit card to pay the $132.60 monthly rent for a storage unit in San Bernardino.
When detectives got a court order to search Gutierrez’s Grindr account, they saw he’d made plans to meet someone at an apartment building 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 indicate violence. Detectives from the Beverly Hills Police Department arrested him in 2021 for burglary and theft, according to a probation report.
The previous year, police were alerted to an intruder at a vacant five-bedroom house. They found a shattered sliding glass door and two televisions missing, the probation report said. In April 2021, a real estate agent showing a $19-million, 7,500-square-foot home arrived to find the property burglarized and three televisions stolen, according to the report.
From surveillance footage, detectives identified the suspect’s car as a black Toyota Prius. In the video, the suspect appeared to be a white man with long curly brown hair, according to a law enforcement source who wasn’t 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 said. The car was outfitted with a stolen license plate.
Prowell was behind the wheel. Inside the car, detectives found a brunette wig and a rubber mask resembling a white male that the law enforcement source said looked realistic enough to be “movie quality.”
According to the probation report, Prowell, who is Black, admitted burglarizing the houses in Beverly Hills. He was homeless and had “fallen on tough times,” he said.
He looked up properties that were listed for sale, knowing they’d be vacant, and burglarized them for televisions that he sold online, Prowell told police. With his background in construction, he said he knew that turning off the homes’ circuit breakers would disable their surveillance systems.
The law enforcement official said Prowell was linked to burglaries in North Hollywood, Van Nuys, West L.A., Santa Monica, South Pasadena and Newport Beach, but there is no record of him being charged for those alleged crimes.
Charged with burglary, grand theft and vandalism for the Beverly Hills break-ins, Prowell was released on bail May 6, 2021. He pleaded no contest four months later to two counts of burglary and one count of grand theft.
When it came to the sentence that Prowell would receive, a probation officer wrote that his “callous and premeditated” crimes would have continued if he hadn’t 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, sentencing Prowell to two years’ probation.
By then, authorities allege, Prowell had already killed.
Around 3 a.m. on Feb. 22, 2025, LAPD officers raced to 59th Place in South L.A., where they’d been dispatched by a report of “unknown trouble,” 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 by the L.A. County district attorney. The man, who is not named in the affidavit, told the officers a harrowing story.
After messaging for months on Grindr, he and a man made plans to meet for the first time. His date, whose name he didn’t know, sent him an address. When he arrived, the man said he allowed himself to be handcuffed and have his ankles bound, thinking they were going to have consensual sex.
Instead, his date pepper-sprayed him, beat him with a metal bat and demanded the PIN to his bank cards, he told police. After covering his eyes with a blindfold, gagging him with a sock and taping his mouth shut, the suspect dragged the man to a car, threatening to put him in the trunk.
The man said he managed to get his legs free and ran out the garage door, 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 persuade the victim to come back inside, even removing the handcuffs, the affidavit said.
Instead, the victim took off running and asked a neighbor to call the police. By the time the officers arrived, the suspect alleged to be Prowell had vanished.
The victim recalled his date’s Grindr username, and detectives served a search warrant on the company, court records show.
It’s unclear how detectives identified Prowell as the suspect, but Lugo said the surviving victim’s account was the break authorities needed.
“Our case was a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Lugo said.
When detectives searched a home associated with Prowell in Inglewood, they found Gutierrez’s Infiniti in the garage, according to a statement from the L.A. County district attorney’s office. His body has still not been found.
Last month, prosecutors charged Prowell with murdering King and Gutierrez and attempting to kill the third victim who described being bound, assaulted and hit with 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 yet to make a decision whether to seek capital punishment.
Angela King said she wanted her father to be known for more than how he died.
She cited the Gospel of Matthew: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.”
