Saved by Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Man Who Beat a Murder Charge Because He Was on TV

It sounds like a premise Larry David would reject for being too neat. A man is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. His only alibi is that he was at a Dodgers game — sitting in an aisle seat, minding his own business, while a comedy crew happened to be filming nearby. Years later, that footage clears him.

Except it wasn’t a script. It happened. And the show that saved him was Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The Morning Everything Stopped

On May 12th, 2003, a sixteen-year-old girl named Martha Puebla was shot and killed outside her home in Los Angeles.

Juan Catalan remembers the morning after clearly. “I was headed to work one day, and bam, there’s somebody who blocks me off. There’s a gun at my head. Within ten seconds, I’m surrounded. One of my daughters was in the back seat crying when all this was going on. And detectives tell me that they’re arresting me for murdering a 16-year-old girl.”

He hadn’t done it. He had never met her. But in the eyes of the investigation, he fit, and that was enough.

The case against him looked overwhelming. The state was pursuing the death penalty. And Juan had something that sounded, to the police, like a convenient story rather than an alibi: he had been at Dodger Stadium that night.

“They kind of laughed,” his attorney Todd Melnik later recalled.

The Phone Number Nobody Expected

Juan was at a Dodgers game on the night in question. And he remembered something else: there had been cameras. A production crew had been filming in the aisles, which had briefly blocked him and his daughter as they went to get candy.

So the defence went looking. An investigator approached a media organisation and asked whether any footage existed from that particular night. Someone checked the logs. A production company had indeed shot there. And the number was passed along.

“So I call up the phone number, they answered: ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’”

‘You Don’t Really Understand the Gravity of This’

The episode being filmed was The Car Pool Lane — a season four episode in which Larry David, desperate to get to a Dodgers game, hires a prostitute so he can use the car pool lane and then has to pretend to be her boyfriend when they’re spotted. A number of scenes were shot at Dodger Stadium, much of it during an actual game.

When Todd Melnik called the production office, the response was what you’d expect from a television company protecting its material.

“Of course, they kind of laughed at me and said, ‘We don’t release any pre-production footage. You can wait till it’s aired.’ And I said, ‘No, you don’t really understand the gravity of this.’”

The kid was looking at the death penalty.

The production coordinator, Tim Gibbons, took the call and thought about the odds. “There was 40,000 people there. I’m sitting all the way up there.”

Still, they pulled all the raw footage from that night and started going through it.

Six or Eight Feet

And then, midway through the tape, there he was.

“I come into the room, and within a minute of me entering the room, the lawyer jumps up and goes, ‘There he is, that’s the guy.’ I jumped out of my chair and said, ‘Roll that back! Roll that back!’”

On the footage: a man walking down an aisle, alongside a little girl. And as he goes, he passes Larry David walking the other way.

“They walk down the aisle, and they go into the aisle just as Larry’s coming up the aisle. And Larry passes within six or eight feet of them probably. And we were — you know, we were tingly at that point. It was like, ‘Oh, my gosh! This is crazy!’”

What made the footage genuinely decisive, though, wasn’t just the image. It was the time code.

“All the video tape has time code on the bottom of it, which is the actual time of day, down to the second that it’s shot. So that placed him in Dodger Stadium at whatever time that was that he was in the footage.”

A timestamp down to the second, from a camera that had no reason to care about Juan Catalan, proved he couldn’t have been at the scene of the murder.

The Phone Call

Juan remembers waiting for the news.

“I remember calling Todd. And, oh, he told me, you know, ‘Call me back.’ I think I talked to him on a Wednesday. ‘Call me back Friday, and I’ll tell you what happened.’ So, you know, those two days, you know, I just couldn’t stop thinking about, you know, ‘Please, God.’ I kept praying, you know, ‘Please be on that tape.’”

When the call came, he could picture his lawyer’s face.

“It was just like I could picture his face with a big Kool-Aid smile on his face. And he was just like, ‘You’re on the tape, you’re on the tape.’ And I just jumped up, I let go of the phone, and just, you know… Everybody was like, ‘What the?’ All the other inmates were like, ‘What’s up with this guy?’”

The Irony Nobody Planned

Here’s the part that sounds almost too perfect to be true. The episode being filmed that night was about a man being arrested for something he didn’t do.

In the plot, Marty Funkhouser — played by Bob Einstein — gets arrested because he was wearing Larry’s jacket, which had marijuana in the pocket. Larry ends up in front of a judge. The episode is, among other things, about the absurd mechanics of the legal system and the way innocent people get swept up in it.

Meanwhile, in real life, an innocent man was sitting in a cell hoping that the same production would accidentally preserve the proof of his innocence.

“It’s a strange universe out there,” one of the crew says. “Maybe Larry’s just tied into it more than we know he is.”

The Courtroom

Tim Gibbons went to the trial. What he saw stayed with him.

“Got into the courtroom and sat down, and there was Juan sitting over at the defendant’s table. He looked really small, really alone, and really frightened to be there.”

The defence presented its case. The video was, by all accounts, the last thing they showed.

“One of the greatest things that I’ll always remember is that there were probably 40 or 50 people that were totally unrelated to the case. And they had watched the Curb Your Enthusiasm video. The judge dismissed the case, and everybody in the gallery started clapping and cheering. It was just a great moment. Just a great moment.”

When Juan walked out, his daughter was waiting.

“I just hugged her, and I couldn’t let her go because it was just… they were trying to take me away from my family. But it was an unbelievable moment.”

Four other people were ultimately arrested for Martha Puebla’s murder, and faced federal charges and the federal death penalty. A young woman was still dead. Nothing about the story is tidy.

What Happened to Everyone Involved

Tim Gibbons found out the scale of what had happened only after returning from a holiday.

“I was in Europe for a few weeks on vacation with my wife, and I came home, and my email was filled with all these letters, people saying, ‘Oh, my God! That’s such an incredible story.’ And I thought, ‘What is going on here?’”

One of the show’s actors, Kym Whitley, found out she was in the clip when people started calling her.

“It was on the news, and then people started calling me because they showed a clip, and I was in the clip. People were like, ‘Uh, Kym, they just showed you on CNN.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been caught.’”

And Larry David’s reaction, according to Gibbons, was utter disbelief. In one article, he apparently said he was going to quit show business and start helping people full time — which, as Gibbons notes, is hilarious if you know Larry.

Then Larry being Larry, he found the comedic angle anyway.

“I’ve got him doing some errands for me. To have somebody that obligated to you for the rest of their lives, it gives me a good feeling. That’s the whole reason to want to save somebody’s life.”

What Juan Took From It

Juan Catalan didn’t walk away with a punchline. He walked away with something closer to a philosophy.

“I learned to just appreciate life. It’s unbelievable what we all have. And you just take it for granted sometimes. I gotta thank Todd for that. For Curb Your Enthusiasm, for being there that day. Just a lot of things came together for me like a puzzle. It gives me goosebumps when I think about it.”

A man went to a baseball game with his daughter. She wanted candy. They got up, walked down an aisle, waited while a camera crew cleared the way, and sat back down.

Fourteen years later, that ninety-second inconvenience was the reason he didn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

Call it coincidence. Call it luck. Call it whatever you like. The footage was real, the timestamp was real, and the man went home to his family.

Sometimes the universe writes better episodes than the writers do.