The Emmanuel Haro disappearance case has now complicated itself to a level beyond any previous expectation, as multiple entities, which over the course of two weeks grew heavily invested in the child’s parents being guilty of having murdered him, now finding themselves at stark loggerheads with one another.
Seven-month-old Emmanuel burst into the public consciousness in San Bernardino County, Southern California, across the country and ultimately globally on August 14, when 41-year-old Rebecca Haro reported to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department that while she was in the parking lot of the Big 5 sporting goods store in Yucaipa, standing outside the passenger side of her vehicle while changing her child’s diaper with him lying in the backseat, a man who came up behind her and greeted her in Spanish bashed her in the head, knocking her cold. When she came to, she was lying on the ground, Rebecca Haro said, and Emmanuel was gone.
The kidnapping had taken place, Rebecca and her 32-year-old husband, Jake Haro, said, while they were in Yucaipa with their two-year-old child and the ten-year-old son Jake had from an earlier marriage, so the older child could participate in a youth league football scrimmage at the Yucaipa athletic stadium, a relatively short distance from the Big 5 sporting goods store. The Haro’s horror story had, or seemed to have, the ring of truth. Rebecca’s right eye had been blackened, and her claim that she had gone to the sporting goods store to buy a mouthguard for her stepson was more than plausible. Within 48 hours after the disappearance, there was a report that a child closely resembling Emmanuel had been spotted in the company of a suspicious adult near Bakersfield in Kern County.
Over the next several days, however, the Haros’ version of events was subjected to withering scrutiny, and not just by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department detectives looking into the matter. Across the world, both professional and amateur sleuths began weighing in on social media, while over a dozen influencers and local web channel hosts and personalities took advantage of their proximity to the situation on the ground, going to the sites of relevance to the story, extending to various spots in Yucaipa, including the stadium and commercial district where the abduction had allegedly taken place, as well as the neighborhood in Cabazon in Riverside County where the Haros lived.
Some were so energetic and resourceful that they traced the family’s movements in the days and weeks prior to Emmanuel’s disappearance in exacting detail, interviewing their neighbors, friends and acquaintances. Even as the sheriff’s department investigators were taking note of what they would characterize as inconsistencies in the Haros’ statements, the impromptu layers of media teams began churning up details and facts that clashed, or seemed to, with the account of the kidnapping or the representations Emmanuel’s parents were making. Moreover, the background of the family and its circumstance, which was initially obscured, began to emerge. Elements of that background suggested that the Haro household was not a safe one for infants.
While the nature of law enforcement investigative processes by their nature do not provide for the information so obtained to be publicly disclosed, it appeared that at least with regard to some of the ground covered by the civilians looking into the matter, a few of those amateurs, at least, learned specifics that had eluded the professionals in the sheriff’s department.
A case in point was the efforts of Ahmed Bellozo, whose Tic Tok Channel “On The Tira” is devoted primarily to happenings, personalities, and landmarks in the Inland Empire. Accompanied by a videographer, Bellozo, armed with a microphone, conducts man-or-woman-on the street interviews, which he then posts on Tic Tok. What Bellozo lacks in formal journalistic training and polish, he makes up for in energy, intrepidity, resourcefulness and boldness, bordering on what some consider unmitigated gall. His guiding principle is steeped in instinct rather than based on rendering an unbiased exploration of whatever issue he has decided to focus on. This cinéma vérité approach to news gathering relies more on suspicion and luck than beforehand research. He films first and gets clearance for having inserted himself into the lives of others later, if he ever asks for the consent of those he videos at all. This unwillingness to adhere to the polite norms of comportment typically employed by news crews has led to awkward and on occasion expletive-filled exchanges that produce far more heat than light. His intent is aimed less at capturing objective reality than propounding his own perspective. Nevertheless, his approach has produced, on occasion, some remarkable and unexpected revelations and/or information that might have otherwise remained buried.
Bellozo took up the Baby Emmanuel case because he immediately recognized that it was a subject that would draw viewers. He was indistinguishable from literally dozens or even scores of other social media figures in that regard and similar to them in one other important aspect, as well. He, like they, concluded that there was a high degree of likelihood that the Haros were plain not telling the truth about their son having been abducted. Indeed, he was certain it was Jake and Rebecca Haro who were responsible for Emmanuel’s “disappearance.” Moreover, to Bellozo, disappearance was a euphemism for a much more grim reality; he believed that the child was dead and that his parents, one way or the other, were responsible for Emmanuel’s death.
Following a set of leads that he has not fully disclosed, Bellozo learned that the Haros had sojourned from their home in Cabazon on Sunday, August 3, a full 11 days before the alleged abduction of their youngest child, to the Waterman Discount Mall in San Bernardino. While there on that day, Bellozo learned, multiple witnesses had seen Rebecca Haro with a fresh and swollen black right eye. This was evidence corroborating his deeply-held belief, Bellozo reported to his viewers, that Rebecca Haro’s tale of having been set upon by an assailant who knocked her to the ground and left her unconscious while snatching her baby away from her was an out-and-out fabrication.
Simultaneously, other bloggers, social media platform contributors, members of the traditional media/press and the investigators with the sheriff’s department assigned to the case were growing increasingly skeptical and then downright unbelieving of the Haros’ narrative of what had happened on August 14. Virtually everyone had learned by this point that not quite seven years previously, Emmanuel’s half-sister, Carolina Rose, the then-ten-week-old daughter of Jake and Vanessa Avina, on October 13, 2018, had been admitted to Hemet Valley Hospital with a freshly broken rib, one which Jake said had come about when he dropped her onto the separating barrier in the sink where he was bathing her. What medical personnel at the hospital found was that in addition to that broken rib, she had five other healing broken ribs, a healing skull fracture and a healing broken leg, along with a neck injury and a brain hemorrhage.
After an investigation of that matter, Riverside County prosecutors charged Jake and Vanessa criminally with child abuse, child neglect and child cruelty. The case against them dragged on for more than four years while each made accusations against the other and their marriage ended in divorce. Jake and Vanessa had another child, Jake Jr., who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. In 2023, both Jake and Vanessa entered guilty pleas to willful cruelty against a child. Jake was sentenced to four years in prison, but the sentence was suspended in lieu of his completing 180 days in jail, during which he was granted a work release. Vanessa was given a 120-day sentence, which was also subject to work release.
Carolina Rose was adopted by Vanessa’s sister, who changed the child’s name to Promise Faith. The child was severely disabled after having had to undergo a tracheotomy, and is now blind, unable to walk or speak, with three to seven percent brain function. She is entirely dependent upon her aunt, her primary caregiver.
Based on what they were learning, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department investigators redoubled their scrutiny of the Haros, whose Cabazon home was subjected to a search warrant, one which included the use of ultraviolet lights and cadaver dogs. Jake’s and Rebecca’s cell phones were seized and they both willingly disclosed to investigators the devices’ passwords.
Contrary to reports that Rebecca was not cooperating with the investigation, she was repeatedly subject to questioning by investigators, as was her husband over the next several days.
Investigators found blood evidence in the Haro residence and discovered Emmanuel’s clothing and bedding along with photos of him discarded in a neighbor’s trash, according to the Sentinel’s sources. This evidence formed a partial basis of the arrest warrant that was served on August 22.
With the Haros’ arrest by San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies, however, despite the previous clamoring in the media for some order of action to be taken against the parents whose guilt was seemingly being universally assumed, there was an immediate sense that the authorities had acted prematurely. What had specifically thrown a large number of people for a loop was the lack of any definitive direct evidence that the child was dead. Reluctantly, San Bernardino County investigators acknowledged Baby Emmanuel’s body had not been found. Nevertheless, both Jake and Rebecca had been booked into the Robert Presley Detention Center in downtown Riverside.
That they were in the Riverside County detention center rather than in the Central Jail in San Bernardino or the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga across the San Bernardino County Line was a tacit indication that the child had been killed in Riverside County. Moreover, in addition to being arrested for the murder of their son, the sheriff’s department alleged as well that the Haros had conspired in perpetrating the murder. This went beyond implying that the couple were involved in their child’s death to asserting, essentially, that they had killed him with malice aforethought, with a conscious disregard for their own child’s life and were working together in deliberate cooperation to kill Emmanuel. This exceed by half the extremely uncharitable characterizations of the Haros that had been popping up all over the Worldwide Web. It more than implied that investigators and prosecutors had specific facts to back up the criminal charges.
Curiously, however, when the Haros, who were awoken at 6:59 a.m. and immediately taken into custody and transported to the Presley Detention Center by 8 a.m. on August 22, their jailers – the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department – did not, as is normally the case with those arrested on murder charges specified in an arrest warrant issued by a court, did not immediately book them. In the case of Rebecca Haro, she was not booked until 12:31 p.m., over a half hour after noon. Jake was not booked until 5:32 p.m.. In this way, Rebecca was relegated to a holding/admission cell for more than four-and-a-half hours, while Jake was placed in such temporary custody for nine-and-a-half hours. This gave the Riverside Sheriff’s Department the opportunity to engage in so-called Perkins operations, those being having undercover law enforcement officer misrepresent themselves as inmates and attempt to engage them in conversations with the goal of obtaining confessions, implicative statements or information relating to the crimes alleged against them.
In reaction to the arrests, the Internet exploded. There were outpourings of information built upon the official announcement of the arrests, augmented with speculation and supposition and occasional insight. For the region’s journalists, ones who fall within the loop of professionals working the local courts and police agencies, there were dividends in the form of detail or documents relating to the case. Simultaneously, an atypical informational pipeline opened, one which those professionals naturally and instinctively followed, but which upon reflection was recognized as highly irregular. Late on August 23, word was that Jake Haro had confessed to killing his son and that Emmanuel’s body had been found or that, at the least, its location was known. The following day, a bevy of investigators accompanied Jake, clad in a dark orange/red jail jumpsuit, to the hillside along the 60 Freeway near Gilman Springs east of Moreno Valley. Members of the press had been alerted ahead of time to the excursion and the anticipated discovery of the dead child’s remains, whereupon a coterie of reporters and photographers were in place to observe, from a distance, the investigative team walking along the fire roads and pathways on the hillside near Gilman Springs.
The involved agencies – the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, the Riverside County Coroner’s Office and the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office – were tight-lipped, at least initially, about what evidence had been found during that Sunday trip into the field. As could have been predicted, however, videos and photographs of Jake accompanied by investigators walking along the rustic trail in the Gilman Springs area were posted to social media sites within an hour and photos ran in the following day’s newspapers, with captions and reports that Jake was speaking to investigators and had divulged to them crucial details about the child’s death and how the tot’s body had been disposed.
A report circulated that Jake Haro had told San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detectives that he had unintentionally rolled over on Emmanuel in bed, discovering the infant dead the next morning, whereupon he panicked and disposed of the body. That report, however, did not appear in any official statement from either the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department or law enforcement in Riverside County, having surfaced on the internet on Sunday. Within the next 24 to 36 hours reports with regard to the Perkins operation surfaced in the traditional press and media, roughly simultaneous to the revelation that the excursion to Gilman Springs had not led to the discovery of Emmanuel’s body. In that context, the forewarning to the press about the Sunday trip to Gilman Springs was seen as an effort by Riverside County authorities – both those in the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office and in the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department – to utilize the newspapers, copies of which would be left lying around on the 7th floor of the Presley Detention Center in which Rebecca Haro was housed, as a means to convince her that her husband had turned and was in full cooperation with investigators, implicating her in their child’s murder.
Reports began to circulate early this week that Jake had told a jail inmate or someone he mistook for an inmate that he had killed Emmanuel and disposed of his body in the trash.
On August 26, both Rebecca and Jake appeared in Riverside Superior Court before Judge Gary Polk to be arraigned on a single PC 187 murder count and a single PC 158.5 misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report that had been lodged against each of them by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. The arraignments had not been held, however, and the proceedings were continued until September 4, reportedly because the public defender’s office did not want to be put into the position of representing both, given the possibility that a conflict might develop between the two defendants in the course of their defense against the charges. For the record, at that time, Deputy Public Defender Brian Cosgrove was representing both parents.
Shortly thereafter, it was determined that Allison Lowe and Paulette Garthwaite from the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office, under the supervision of Cosgrove, who with Lowe heads the public defender’s office’s complex litigation division, will represent Jake and that Jeff Moore of the Riverside-based law firm of Blumenthal & Moore will represent Rebecca to ensure that if any conflict between the husband and wife emerges, neither will be disadvantaged by having a legal team with divided loyalties.
The postponement until September 4, it was widely noted, would provide the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department with the opportunity to continue with the Perkins operations in an effort to solidify the case against the couple.
Thereafter, there was a cacophony suggesting something was amiss with the case, with questions as to why the parents had been arrested prior to there being absolute certainty that the child was in fact dead and why it was necessary to perpetuate the sheriff’s department’s, and therefore the district attorney’ office’s, investigation into the facts of the case. A point of sensitivity was why the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department had made the arrests when, to all indication, the murder, if in fact a murder had taken place, occurred in Riverside County.
In the minds of at least some, what was occurring with Rebecca and Jake Haro had echoes of a now infamous missing persons case out of San Bernardino County, that of Thomas Perez, Sr. of Fontana. The manner in which another San Bernardino County law enforcement agency, the Fontana Police Department, had dealt with that matter had proven most unfortunate, devolving into a debacle of regrettable proportion when its detectives arrested Perez’s son, Tom Perez, after the younger Perez reported his father as missing. Fontana Police Department detectives accused Tom Perez of murder, banging on him psychologically unendingly and unmercifully, insisting that despite his father’s body not yet having turned up that he had killed his father, browbeating him into making a confession. A few days later, Thomas Perez, Sr. returned from a trip he had made to San Francisco to the home in Fontana that he shared with Tom, very much alive.
Riverside District Attorney Mike Hestrin this week found himself in a very uncomfortable position of having a growing number of people, including members of the Fourth Estate, questioning his judgment in proceeding with the case against the Haros after being saddled with their arrests by not the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department but the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which had yet to definitively confirm that the victim – seven-month-old Baby Emmanuel – was indeed dead. Blood may indeed have been present in the Haros’ Cabazon home, but that was by no means proof positive that the child was dead or that the blood in question originated with Emmanuel, observers said. A child’s clothes and a blanket being placed into the trash could not be construed as proof positive that the child was dead, it was remarked. The sighting of a child matching Emmanuel Haro’s description in Kern County had never been satisfactorily resolved or adequately followed up on, according to those who had taken notice of that early development in the case.
The doubts and questions had grown to the point that on Wednesday, August 27, Hestrin called for and hosted a press conference, at which San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco were also in attendance, in an effort to allay the growing questions about the case, in particular to explain why the arrests had been made.
Hestrin by his presence made an assertion of authority and credibility, displaying his gravitas and charisma with a show of his command of the intricacies of the law as well as his mastery of the Spanish language in answering a question from a Mexican press correspondent. He was not in a position to lay out the entire case against the Haros, the district attorney said, and it would be a violation of prosecutorial ethics to do so, but he asserted nonetheless that he stood by the decision to charge the couple with the murder of their son.
“The defendants in this case have been charged with crimes, serious crimes,” Hestrin said. “The filing in this case reflects our believe that Baby Emmanuel was abused, the victim of child abuse over time and that eventually because of that abuse he succumbed to those injuries. We charged both Jake and Rebecca with murder. Now, they have a presumption of innocence that applies to them. They’re innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. I’m not allowed to prove my case in the court of public opinion. So there’s a lot that we can’t say here in terms of the facts and the evidence. For that, you will have to come to the court and the various hearings to see how the case plays out.”
Hestrin noted that the Haros had held a press conference of their own in which they told “the public, the media and ultimately law enforcement that their child had been kidnapped when, in fact, that’s not what occurred.”
Hestrin took the bull by the horns when a reporter delved into whether the location of Emmanuel’s body was known.
“Yes,” Hestrin said. “We have a pretty strong indication of where the remains of Baby Emmanuel are.” He implied but did not specifically state that it was now just a matter of making a scientific confirmation being made. “That investigation is ongoing at this time,” he said.
In one swoop, it seemed, Hestrin had overcome the doubt that had cropped up with regard to the case. Hestrin furthered that impression by having Sheriff Dicus explain that evidence crucial to the case, which by the context of what was said seemed to indicate the child’s body, had been located through information obtained from Jake Haro.
“I’m not going to go into great detail about that, but there is some level of cooperation with the suspect’s involved in this,” Dicus said. “We’re trying to locate that, and our job is to follow every lead.”
Hestrin further finessed the reporters present when it came to lingering questions relating to the interviews or interrogations and/or the Perkins operations undertaken by Riverside County Sheriff’s Department investigators targeting the Haros while they were in custody in Riverside County along with the previous questioning of the couple by San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detectives. When asked about Jake Haro having made a confession to either purposefully or inadvertently killing his son, the district attorney initially deflected the question, skirting around Dicus’s indication of the couple’s cooperation with investigators.
While most of the press corps appeared ready to accept Hestrin’s assertion that Riverside County Sheriff’s Department investigators had not coaxed Jake Haro into a confession and not examine closely his  somewhat elliptical suggestion that Emmanuel’s body had been discovered, when Bellazo was given the opportunity to question Hestrin, he cut to the heart of that matter and the mystery that yet persisted regarding it, forcing Hestrin to explicitly deal with the question.
“I didn’t say I know where the remains are,” Hestrin responded to Bellazo’s challenge.
Bellozo said he had exhausted himself trying to get to the bottom of the issue, and that he wanted a straight answer.
“Well, you should get some rest, sir,” Hestrin, agitated but seeking to contain himself, responded. “I can’t share with you anything.”
The district attorney then sought to dissuade Bellozo or anyone else from inserting themselves into the effort to find Emmanuel’s body. As he did so, Hestrin brought attention to the core of the controversy: the readiness of his office and both of the involved sheriff’s departments to conclude that the child had been murdered without having produced the critical evidence that the child was dead.
“Look,” Hestrin said, “there are professionals that are looking for the remains of this child,” finally stating unequivocally, as he had previously avoided, that Emmanuel Haro’s body had not been found. “If the public has any information, then we ask for their help. So, we don’t know exactly where the remains are. We have some ideas of where we’re going to look and where we’re going to continue to investigate.”
Hestrin cut off an inquiry into whether the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department had succeeded with the Perkins operation.
“I can tell you that’s not true,” he said when asked if Jake Haro had been tricked into confessing to the murder. “There’s no confession made in jail.”
As the questioning thereafter grew more intense with regard to the information that had been obtained in the course of the investigation that had not yet been released but which justified the filing of the murder charges and was tumbling out in various postings and articles about the case, Hestrin implied that much of what was being written or posted was inaccurate, though he made no specific corrections. He decried the postings relating to Jake Haro’s alleged confession to killing his son, Jake Haro’s divulging of the location of the body, Jake Haro’s admission of disposing of the body in the trash and the disclosure of the Perkins operations as counterproductive.
Calling much of what was being reported “untrue,” Hestrin said, “This is what happens when you’ve got all these folks out there online and these keyboard warriors. You get a lot of misinformation.”
Bianco, saying “I actually complimented the mainstream media because you’ve been reaching out to us and actually been printing what we’ve told you” chastised the press for being so gullible as to pursue any  angles on the story that did not uphold the official version of events. “If someone posts something on social media, you all believe it’s true,” he said. Disregarding that a large segment of those engaging in amateur sleuthing and blogging had brought attention to and delineated the inconsistencies in the Haros’s narrative and had championed investigators playing hardball with the couple, Bianco said influencers and social media participants now questioning the paucity of information being disclosed by his department with regard to the case and the district attorney’s office’s decision to open a prosecution without having the child’s body in hand as “doing nothing but harming this investigation. And when you form your opinion and come in here and ask questions like that, you’re not serving the public in any way. There should not be anyone out there looking for Baby Emmanuel except for us. Social media’s devotion of attention to the matter, which he said was loaded with “misinformation, lies and purposeful misdirection,” was uncalled for, Bianco said. “All you’re going to do is complicate things in the future,” he said. “I am begging all of you with cameras out here don’t be a part of it.”