#556 Jason Flom with Franky Carrillo

Wrongful Conviction

Lava for Good Podcasts

True Crime

4.4 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On January 18, 1991, six teenage boys were standing on a curb talking in front of a house in the Los Angeles, CA suburb of Lynwood. Donald Sarpy, the father of one of the boys, stepped onto the driveway to call his son inside when a car drove by and two shots were fired, killing Sarpy.

16-year-old Francisco “Franky” Carrillo Jr. became a suspect in the case after he was mistakenly identified by the police as the shooter in separate case. On the night of the Sarpy shooting, the police showed one of the eyewitnesses a picture of Carrillo. That witness later identified Carrillo as the shooter and told the five other witnesses to identify Carrillo as the shooter. There was no physical evidence linking Carrillo to the crime. However, all the eyewitnesses identified Carrillo as the shooter and testified to the identification. Franky was convicted of murder, attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.

We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	with the police banging on the door open up the choice to be in that lineup was the last choice
0:12.6	I made as a free man a year later I ended up right in the system I'm going to be one of those
0:19.1	people who everyone in the world is going to think is a monster
0:21.8	or suspect is a monster for the rest of my life, and I'm just going to have to come to peace with that.
0:27.3	Somebody was able to look at my picture in a database and say that I was somewhere where I definitely wasn't.
0:34.4	I overheard three of the jailers discussing what part they might have to play in my hanging. They had been told that two prison officers would have to participate in my execution. And I walked back inside that prison for the last time, man. All hell broke loose, man. I'm Welcome to another episode of wrongful conviction with Jason Flom.
1:06.4	Today we have a very incredible person as our guest.
1:10.7	Our featured exonerie today is Frankie Carrillo.
1:13.4	Carrillo was 16 in 1991. Fifteen sheriff's deputies with guns drawn stormed through the front door.
1:19.9	Carrillo was convicted of murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
1:23.4	Frankie was released from jail in downtown L.A. this afternoon after spending 20 years in prison.
1:28.8	Rio was released after the court found evidence that Carrillo was framed through coerced testimony for a fatal drive-by shooting.
1:35.3	The gang of corrupt L.A. sheriff's deputies, known as the Linwood Vikings, coerced six witnesses into identifying him in a photo lineup.
1:48.2	Frankie, welcome. Jason's good to be here. So Frankie,
1:54.9	your story begins when you were really just a child. I was a baby man. Let's go back to the beginning.
2:02.1	You grew up in L.A., right? That's correct. Southern California. And you got a pretty happy upbringing, right? Yeah,
2:08.2	I would say that, yeah. Everything was going along more or less okay. Nothing's easy about being a 16-year-old boy.
2:16.5	That's right. Then one day, it all was turned upside down. That day was January 24th, 1991. I was just a little color there. I was a high school student. I was the child of a
2:19.4	divorce family, four siblings. My father had raised us in stage of nine. So it was a very male
2:24.6	dominated household. Dad and two boys was what I'd known for the past seven years.
2:29.4	And you had sort of a unique situation too, which is that your mom had one day just decided to
2:33.1	check out. That's it, yep. It wasn't like they got separated and you spent half the time with her or she just left.
	...

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