The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office will pursue capital convictions against two of the five foreign nationals involved in the killing of six other drug traffickers during what was apparently a botched marijuana-for-money transaction on January 23 near Shadow Mountain Ghost Town, touching off reports that a deal had been cut with one of the five accused murderers for his testimony against his co-defendants.
Based on cryptic and shrouded information that has been released as a consequence of the justice system process to which Jose Manuel Burgos Parra, 26; Jose Nicolas Hernandez-Sarabia, 33; Toniel Baez-Duarte, 34; Mateo Baez-Duarte, 24; and Jose Gregorio Hernandez-Sarabia, 34, are being subjected or which has otherwise been assembled in the aftermath of the killings of Narcisco Sandoval, 47; Kevin Dariel Bonilla, 25; Baldemar Mondragon-Albarran, 34; Jose Ruelas-Calderon, 45; Adrian Ochoa-Salgado, 34; and Franklin Noel Bonilla, 22, it appears the architect of the narrative the district attorney’s office will seek to utilize in prosecuting the case is being provided by Toniel Baez-Duarte. In return, the elder Baez-Duarte brother will not be subject to the prosecutorial and sentencing enhancements that will be visited on the other four defendants.
While members of the sheriff’s department and prosecutors have acknowledged in exchanges with one another that Toniel Baez-Duarte’s story may or may not be true in several of its aspects, based on what he has had to say there are relative stages and depths of evil in what occurred on January 23 and led up to it.
The worst actors, according to Toniel Baez-Duarte, were Parra and Jose Hernandez-Sarabia.
According to Sergeant Michael Warrick, the lead investigator on the case, Parra, the Hernandez-Sarabia brothers and the Baez-Duarte brothers arranged to meet with Sandoval, Mondragon-Albarran, Ruelas-Calderon, Ochoa-Salgado and the Bonilla brothers in the late afternoon or early evening of January 23 proximate to the El Mirage off-road trail 4652 marker not far from the Shadow Mountain Road/Lessing Avenue intersection. The eleven men had come to that remote spot in an area well known for illegal marijuana cultivation to sell a substantial amount of marijuana which might have been grown in a set of greenhouses located just west of the Los Angeles County/San Bernardino County boundary in the community of Piñon Hills. Either something went wrong and some misunderstanding ensued or Parra, the Hernandez-Sarabia brothers and the Baez-Duarte brothers from the outset had intended to take the more than $50,000 that Sandoval, Mondragon-Albarran, Ruelas-Calderon, Ochoa-Salgado and the Bonilla brothers had brought with them without actually delivering the marijuana. Sandoval, Mondragon-Albarran, Ruelas-Calderon, Ochoa-Salgado and the Bonilla brothers were shot, with Sandoval, Mondragon-Albarran, Ruelas-Calderon, Ochoa-Salgado and Kevin Bonilla rendered completely incapacitated or expiring shortly after the shooting broke out. Franklin Bonilla, though wounded, managed, on foot, to make his way out into the rough terrain of the desert, where he was hidden in the chaparral.
At 8:16 p.m. Franklin Bonilla, though gravely wounded, had made it far enough away from the scene of the shooting to be able to speak on his cell phone without being heard by his assailants. He managed to call 911 and, speaking in Spanish, told a sheriff’s dispatcher he had been shot. He was unable to provide his exact location beyond stating it was near Adelanto. Shortly thereafter, the call went dead.
Using the geographic positioning data emanating from Bonilla’s phone, his approximate position was determined to be roughly a quarter of a mile from the Lessing Avenue/Shadow Mountain Road intersection.
A California Highway Patrol helicopter was immediately dispatched to the area, as were several San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies. 
In the meantime, Parra, the Hernandez-Sarabia brothers and the Baez-Duarte brothers managed to find and remove the wallets and cell phones on the persons of Sandoval, Mondragon-Albarran, Ruelas-Calderon, Ochoa-Salgado and Kevin Bonilla. An effort to torch one of the vehicles that Sandoval, Mondragon-Albarran, Ruelas-Calderon, Ochoa-Salgado and the Bonilla brothers had used to get to the location, a blue Chevrolet Trailblazer SUV with Oregon plates, was made. One of those who had been shot was inside the Trailblazer.
The effort to initiate a conflagration large enough to engulf the Trailblazer in flames failed, and the body inside it was not in any way burned. Another vehicle, a silver Dodge Caravan van with California license plate 9HUW954 and a blue 2024 expiration tag, was also parked near the Lessing Avenue/Shadow Mountain Road intersection/El Mirage off-road trail 4652 marker. Four of the bodies were littered at various distances around the Dodge Caravan.  An attempt to burn the bodies of the four who were outside of the vehicles was made, with the fire succeeding in partially but incompletely taking to two of those bodies and only minor charring marring the other two. At some indefinite point early that evening, Parra, the Hernandez-Sarabia brothers and the Baez-Duarte brothers left, leaving the Sandoval, Mondragon-Albarran, Ruelas-Calderon, Ochoa-Salgado and Kevin Bonilla corpses and abandoning the Trailblazer and Caravan where they stood.
In response to Franklin Bonilla’s call, the first arriving deputy on the ground, assisted by instrumentation on the CHP helicopter hovering nearby, came upon the gruesome scene at 8:40 p.m., followed shortly thereafter by other deputies.
Alone in the desert, at some distance away from where his brother and the four others had died, Franklin Bonilla succumbed to his wounds. His body was found sometime later.
Within a relatively short period of time, investigators were able to use the electronic blueprint from Franklin Bonilla’s phone to trace out his itinerary over the previous few days and connect up his communications with some of the others. Within a day, family members of one of the victims came forward to identify him. The whereabouts of at least four of the victims were extrapolated from their cell phone accounts after they were identified, and contact between some of the victims and at least two of their assailants – either Parra, the Hernandez-Sarabia brothers and the Baez-Duarte brothers – was tracked, as captured by their cell phone interactions in the days leading up to January 23 as well as that fateful day itself. This gave investigators a way of ascertaining who was involved in the shooting near the Lessing Avenue/Shadow Mountain Road intersection. and the rough relationship between the parties. It took investigators some time to identify Ochoa-Salgado.
On Sunday, January 28, 2024, the sheriff’s department obtained and served multiple search warrants in the Town of Apple Valley, Adelanto and the Los Angeles County area of Piñon Hills. Parra, the Hernandez-Sarabia brothers and the Baez-Duarte brothers were arrested.
In the time since, through isolating each of the five and offering them certain inducements, investigators have been able to secure the semi-cooperation of Toniel Baez-Duarte. HIs version of events and anticipated testimony, whether true or not, will likely prove sufficient to get convictions of his brother, Parra and the Hernandez-Sarabia brothers, prosecutors are confident.
The district attorney’s office will ask for the death penalty to be applied to Parra and Jose Nicolas Hernandez-Sarabia and will request that Baez-Duarte, his brother and Jose Gregorio Hernandez-Sarabia be sentenced to life in prison without parole, if convicted.
All five have been charged with six counts of murder and six counts of second-degree robbery. Parra, both Hernandez-Sarabia brothers and Mateo Baez-Duarte will have sentencing enhancements pertaining to their activity applied to their cases. Toniel Baez-Duarte faces the same six counts of murder and six counts of second-degree robbery as the others, but the prosecution will not seek sentencing enhancements against him. The district attorney will lay out the option of his being sentenced to life in prison without parole, but either the judge or jury would have the option to sentence him to 25 years to life, with the potential for parole, if that is deemed proper.
-Mark Gutglueck