When his date removed the handcuffs, the man thought it was for consensual sex.
He submitted to having his wrists and ankles tied together. Then the other man pulled out a baseball bat.
The Feb. 22 incident, recounted in a detective’s affidavit, began on Grindr, a dating app for gay men. It ended with the handcuffed man seriously injured – but alive.
Through his cooperation, Los Angeles police detectives said they identified his alleged attacker as Rockim Prowell, 34, and suspected this was not the first time he had lured a victim using Grindr.
Prowell was charged in September with the murders of two men whose deaths remained unsolved for years, authorities said.
“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, burglary and assault. His attorney, 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, authorities say, when a married father of five left the house at 1 a.m. for a date with a man he had 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 tailgate area of the vehicle, Lugo said, was covered in blood.
King, 51, had been reported missing by his wife and children 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 hard, ran a daycare 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 was simply taking an unannounced vacation.
“I didn’t know what to think,” she recalls. “I was scared. My dad was home every night, every day.”
Lugo and his partner, Det. Leo Sanchez reviewed King’s phone data and learned that he 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 decomposing 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 gunshot to the head.
Then the case went cold.
Robert Gutierrez left his home in South Los Angeles on the evening of Aug. 21, 2023, an LAPD detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit. He told his nephew he was meeting someone he met 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 is cooperating with law enforcement and encourages people to use its video calling feature to verify connections out of concern 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 in which killers met their victims on Grindr. In London, authorities investigated the deaths of four men in 2014 and 2015, drugged, raped and killed by a suspect they met on Grindr, the BBC reported.
In 2023, a Scottish father of two was killed 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 Paul talk about his life choices,” his widow told the court, according to the BBC, “but I don’t judge him.”
Two days after Gutierrez left home, her nephew reported her missing.
According to a search warrant affidavit, LAPD detectives searched the city’s seizure logs and license plate readers for Gutierrez’s black Infiniti FX35, finding nothing. His bank records showed someone used his credit card to pay the $132.60 monthly rent on a storage unit in San Bernardino.
When detectives received a court order to search Gutierrez’s Grindr account, they discovered he had planned to meet someone at an apartment building on Imperial Highway in Inglewood, according to the affidavit.
Man’s name: Rockim Lee Prowell.
Prowell had a modest criminal record, but there was no indication of violence. Detectives with the Beverly Hills Police Department arrested him in 2021 on burglary and theft charges, according to a probation report.
The year before, police were alerted to an intruder at a vacant five-bedroom house. They found a broken sliding glass door and two televisions missing, according to the probation report. In April 2021, a real estate agent showing a 7,500-square-foot home worth $19 million arrived and found 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 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, according to the probation report. The car had a stolen license plate.
Prowell was behind the wheel. Inside the car, detectives found a brown wig and rubber mask resembling a white man that the police source said appeared realistic enough to be “movie quality.”
According to the probation report, Prowell, who is black, admitted to burglarizing homes in Beverly Hills. He was homeless and had “gone through some tough times,” he said.
He sought out properties listed for sale, knowing they would be vacant, and burglarized them for televisions he was selling online, Prowell told police. With his experience in construction, he said he knew that turning off the circuit breakers on homes would disable their monitoring systems.
The law enforcement official said Prowell was linked to burglaries in North Hollywood, Van Nuys, West LA, 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 burglaries, Prowell was released on bond on May 6, 2021. He pleaded no contest four months later to two counts of burglary and one count of grand theft.
As for the sentence Prowell would receive, a probation officer wrote that his “callous and premeditated” crimes would have continued had he not been arrested. But with no criminal history, Prowell was eligible for probation.
The judge accepted the officer’s recommendation not to impose prison time, sentencing Prowell to two years of probation.
By then, authorities say, Prowell had already killed.
On Feb. 22, 2025, around 3 a.m., LAPD officers rushed to 59th Place in South Los Angeles, where they had been dispatched on 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 from the Los Angeles County district attorney. The man, whose name is not mentioned in the affidavit, told police a harrowing story.
After exchanging messages 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 tied around her ankles, thinking they were going to have consensual sex.
Instead, his date pepper-sprayed him, beat him with a metal bat and demanded the PIN of his bank cards, he told police. After blindfolding him, gagged 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 free his legs and ran out the garage door screaming.
The suspect – identified by police as Prowell – started the car and slammed into the man, breaking his leg. He got out of the car and tried to persuade the victim to go back inside, even removing the handcuffs, according to the affidavit.
Instead, the victim ran away and asked a neighbor to call the police. By the time police arrived, the suspect believed to be Prowell was missing.
The victim remembered her date’s Grindr username and detectives served a search warrant on the business, according to court records.
It’s unclear how detectives identified Prowell as the suspect, but Lugo said the surviving victim’s account was the information authorities needed.
“Our case relied on 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 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 the third victim who described being 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 prosecutor’s office has not yet made a decision whether to seek the death penalty.
Angela King said she wants her father to be known for more than how he died.
She cited the Gospel of Matthew: “Judge not, lest you be judged. For with the judgment that you pronounce, you will be judged, and with the measure with which you measure, you will be measured.”
