Murder trial of Midlands restaurateur will hinge on why he shot his wife’s lover

There is no dispute that Gregorio “Greg” Leon, the owner of a chain of Mexican restaurants stretching across the Midlands, killed a man on Valentine’s Day 2016. The question is why.

“I shot my wife’s lover,” Leon told a 911 operator just eleven minutes after 28-year-old Arturo Bravo Santos was gunned down on the backseat of a truck in a Lexington County park and ride. Leon’s wife, Rachel, who was also in the backseat of the truck, was unharmed. Leon, owner of the popular San Jose Mexican restaurants, had followed her to the quiet parking lot off of U.S. 378 using a tracking device attached to her car.

Barely 30 seconds after Leon arrived, the fatal shots were fired, according to surveillance footage played Tuesday before a jury of seven women and five men on the first day of testimony in Leon’s murder trial. But in a trial scheduled to last for two weeks, attorneys will battle over details about what happened in those few fateful seconds, as well as what Leon knew that night about the relationship between Bravo and Leon’s wife.

Opening statements delivered Tuesday in the courtroom of circuit court Judge Walton J. McLeod IV outlined the competing visions for these key questions.

You will find intent and malice in Leon’s actions, 11th Circuit Deputy Solicitor Suzanne Mayes told the jury, who is trying the case alongside Solicitor Rick Hubbard. For more than a month, a suspicious Leon had been tracking his wife with a device attached to her car and hatching a deadly scheme, Mayes said.

“This is a case about Greg Leon having a plan and seeing that plan through. And it ended in murder,” Mayes said. After fleeing the scene, Leon placed several calls to his attorney and two of his sons before he called 911 to confess.

But defense attorney Jack Swerling argued that in reality Leon, who shared seven children with his wife, was a loving husband who was concerned about her weight loss and sudden changes in her behavior. Fearing that she was using drugs, he tracked her to the parking lot, where he heard her scream, Swerling said.

Fearing the worst, he opened the door to the truck and saw Bravo naked except for his socks and his wife with her pants down.

“At that point he didn’t know what was going on. Was his wife being assaulted? Was she being raped?” Swerling told the jury. When Bravo said “I’ll kill you Gregario” and moved as if to grab something, possibly a gun, Leon fired the fatal shots.

“When you’re acting in self defense you don’t have all this time to think about what’s going on,” Swerling said.

The affair

Tuesday made clear just how important the relationship between Bravo and Rachel Leon will be to both the prosecution and the defense.

In opening statements, Swerling denied that Leon knew his wife was having an affair and accused Bravo of being a “gigolo.” Bravo had aliases: a Mexican consular ID and a Wells Fargo debit card bearing the name Arnulfo Gil Liles were found in his truck. He maintained relationships with several women, Swerling said, and he targeted Rachel Leon because of her husband’s wealth, extracting gifts and money and possibly even forcing her into sex.

But prosecutors argued that Bravo and Rachel Leon were conducting a consensual, if poorly-hidden, affair. Rachel snuck away for trysts and vacations with Bravo and posted indiscreetly about him on Facebook. She showered him in gifts, including the silver 2014 Toyota Tundra pickup truck in which he was killed. She had bought the truck for him just three days before the shooting and was also paying for the insurance.

The affection appeared to be mutual. Forensic analyst Jamie Johnson, at the time a crime scene investigator with the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department, detailed the contents of the pickup truck, which included an assortment of Valentine’s Day gifts, among them flowers, Lindt chocolates in a gold heart-shaped box and a teddy bear in a red basket.

After being shot, Bravo fell face first from the vehicle. He was dead by the time paramedics arrived, said James Forsyth, a Lexington County EMS first responder who was the first on the scene.

Bravo was struck by two bullets, which were recovered from his body, said Johnson, the seventh and final witness on Tuesday. A third round was recovered just feet from where Bravo’s body lay, and a fourth round was recovered from inside the rear-driver’s side door, Johnson said.

The rounds are believed to have been fired from a .357 revolver that Leon disposed of on the side of the road, which investigators also recovered.

A trial seven years in the making

Greg Leon has never shied from either attention or controversy. The Los Angeles Times reported that a South Carolina Hispanic newspaper once described him “un orgullo Hispano” — a Hispanic to be proud of — but he has also attracted controversy, including a cockfighting arrest, wage violation investigations from the Department of Labor and paying bribes to former Lexington County Sheriff James Metts. Leon cooperated with prosecutors in an investigation against Metts and in return received just 200 hours of community service and five years of probation as punishment.

The trial was delayed for seven years following COVID, a shortage of Spanish language interpreters and allegations of witness tampering.

In pre-trial motions, prosecutors won a significant victory when McLeod, the judge, ruled that they could introduce evidence that Leon allegedly attempted to bribe a witness.

“He took the law into his own hands,” said Mayes, as she described how Leon allegedly paid a witness.

But Swerling dismissed the allegations as being immaterial to the case, which he argued should be focused solely on Leon’s actions the night of Feb. 14, 2016.

“It’s a red herring, it’s magician’s misdirection,” Swerling said.

In court Tuesday, Leon wore a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a red cross necklace sometimes hanging out of his unbuttoned collar. More than a dozen family members and supporters sat in the rows behind him.

In the seven years since his arrest, Leon has followed the conditions of his release and not communicated with his wife or spent a single night with her, Swerling said.

“They’ve carried that out to the letter of the law.”