Contradictory and provably false statements made to investigators by Jake and Rebecca Haro, blood evidence found in the home they shared with their two youngest children and Jake’s oldest son together with the discarding of their youngest child’s bedding and clothes formed the basis of their August 22 arrests on charges that they killed their 7-month-old son, Emmanuel.
The case is compounded by further internal inconsistencies, ones that so far have proven irresolvable, in Jake’s equally contradictory admissions to having killed his son, made both knowingly and unknowingly to law enforcement officers with two separate agencies availing themselves of completely different investigative techniques.
Equally in flux and inexact is the estimated date of the child’s death, which, under the theories of how the infant’s death came about, have varied, at different times, by almost as much as two weeks, from as late as just a day or two prior to August 14, the day the Haros’ originally told authorities the baby had been abducted back to as early as the final two or three days of July.
In the aftermath of the Haro’ report of their child’s kidnapping, an intense investigation into Emmanuel’s disappearance and the events and circumstances surrounding it was launched by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. During the course of that investigation, certain anomalies and troubling facts were uncovered, which extended to inconsistencies in several aspects of Rebecca Haro’s account of what she had experienced on August 14. Based on a set of recitations of fact put into an affidavit for a search warrant, the Haros home and vehicle were searched and their electronic devices, including cell phones were seized. The Haros provide their passwords for the devices, giving the investigators full access to the data within them in very short order.
Investigators found blood evidence in the Haro residence and Emmanuel’s clothing, bed clothes and photos 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.
Revealed to the Sentinel by highly credible sources within the law enforcement hierarchy connected to the case is that after more than a week of maintaining, along with his wife, that the child had been kidnapped on August 14 by an unknown man who had overpowered and knocked Rebecca unconscious as she was changing Emmanuel’s diaper on the passenger side backseat of the family vehicle in the parking lot at the Big 5 sporting goods store in Yucaipa, Jake Haro admitted that he had inadvertently killed his son by rolling over on him while he slept. In that narrative, he had disposed of the child’s body somewhere in the hills off the side of the 60 Freeway near Gilman Springs.
The Haros were awakened at their Cabazon home in Riverside County at 6:59 a.m. on August 22 and arrested on suspicion of murder in Emmanuel’s death. Based on the death having allegedly occurred in Riverside County, the two were booked into the Robert Presley Detention Center in downtown Riverside and the court there scheduled them for an arraignment on August 26 with an eye toward their standing trial on murder charges in Riverside County Superior Court.
Despite the consideration that Jake and Rebecca arrived at the Robert Presley Detention Center shortly before 8 a.m. on August 22, Rebecca remained in a holding cell and interrogation room for more than four-and-a-half hours, until 12:31 p.m. before she was booked and transferred to a holding cell/dormitory among the general female population of the jail on the 7th floor. In Jake Haro’s case, he was not booked until 5:32 p.m.
The delays in the couple’s bookings, more than four hours in Rebecca’s case and more than nine hours in Jake’s case, provided for a hand-off of the matter from San Bernardino County investigators to Riverside County investigators, in this case both being with their respective county’s sheriff’s department.
This afforded the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department the opportunity, the Sentinel is reliably informed, an opportunity to engage in a so-called Perkins operation.
A Perkins operation is an undercover jailhouse investigative strategy that involves a police officer or employee posing as a fellow inmate to interact with a suspect/arrestee while both are ostensibly incarcerated to surreptitiously gather information to assist in a yet-ongoing investigation and/or to be used against the suspect as evidence in court.
According to a well-placed individual in the Riverside County criminal justice system, Perkins operations were employed against both Rebecca Haro and Jake Haro to lead them into separately believing that different individuals they were speaking with in the confines of the Robert Presley Detention Center were inmates rather than law enforcement officers. In addition to the quarters in which Rebecca and Jake had these encounters with the undercover officers being subjected to both video and audio surveillance, the undercover officers were wearing body cameras.
On Sunday, August 24, two days after the Haros’ arrests, Jake, accompanied by law enforcement officers, including ones from both the San Bernardino County and Riverside County, went to an area near Gilman Springs Road off the 60 Freeway, reportedly to assist in the recovery of Emmanuel’s body. That search ended without any trace of the child being located, the Sentinel is told.
Now comes a report that the officer in the Perkins operation managed to obtain from Jake that he had killed his son and had disposed of his body in the trash.