After a delay of more than a week, Jake and Rebecca Haro were arraigned in Riverside Superior Court on September 4 on one charge each in the murder of their son and filing a false police report.
The arraignment took place 21 days after Rebecca, bearing a blackened right eye, reported that she had been knocked unconscious in the parking lot of the Yucaipa Big 5 sporting goods store while she was changing the diaper of her 7-month-old son, Emmanuel, as he lay on the backseat of the family car, whereupon she came to and discovered that he was gone. That report had triggered a frenzied search for the child and his alleged abductor, one that ranged through contiguous Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Kern counties. Within 48 hours, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detectives delving into the matter found inconsistencies in the story Rebecca and her husband told and retold them, and their focus shifted. The investigation of the Haros intensified when it was learned that Jake had been arrested in 2018 along with his then wife, Vanessa Avina, when it was learned that their then-six week old daughter, Carolina Rose, had recently suffered a broken rib and had five other partially healed broken ribs, a healing skull fracture, bleeding of the brain, a neck injury and a healing broken leg bone. The case against both Avina and Jake dragged on for five years, during which time their marriage ended in divorce and the child, who was left severely disabled for life as a result of her injuries, was adopted by Avina’s sister. In 2023, Haro and Avina were convicted of willful abuse of a child, with Jake Haro having been given a four-year sentence that was suspended in lieu of probation. At the time of Emmanuel’s disappearance, Jake was facing the potential of having that probation revoked after he had been caught in possession of a firearm.
The missing child/kidnap investigation, which was yet being conducted by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, shifted to one in which the premise was that the parents were involved in the disappearance of their son.
As part of its investigative strategy, members of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department team working the case provided snippets of information to selected members of the press as well as social media influencers who had initially latched onto the effort to find Baby Emmanuel as a cause célèbre. This was done both with and without the explicit permission of homicide division Sergeant Nicholas Clark, who was heading the investigation. The hope was that, as the matter morphed from a missing child search to one in which suspicion had fallen on the parents, that Jake and Rebecca might be broken under the strain of continual revelations and the glare of negative publicity and that one or two or perhaps more of the newfangled breed of citizen journalists with their unorthodox methods of “newsgathering” might stumble upon something useful in the probe that had eluded the department’s investigators using their conventional means of approaching the case.
Detectives obtained search warrants and served them at the Haros’ residence at 50008 Ramona Street in Cabazo on August 18 seizing a number of items, including a bloody rug and discovered in their trash and that of their neighbors what was believed to be Emmanuel’s clothing and bedding as well as photographs of the child. Detectives brought onto the Haros’ premises cadaver dogs, which made several passes over the 0.89-acre [38,768 square foot] property but were unable to turn up anything. The search warrants also allowed for the seizure of Jake’s truck, Jake and Rebecca’s cellphones, their home computer. Both Rebecca and Jake provided the investigators with the passwords to those devices. In the days prior to the department’s forensic team’s analyzation of the data contained in those devices, the couple had been subjected to electronic surveillance.
Based upon the global positioning data contained in the Haros’ phones, they were able to track them to a local Home Depot just days before Rebecca had reported their son as being abducted. At that store, detectives obtained security video footage which showed the couple together, purchasing rope, shovels, lye and a 50-gallon bucket.

At that point, the investigators were convinced that Emmanuel was dead and that the Haros had disposed of his body. On August 22, after obtaining arrest warrants from the Riverside County Superior Court, heavily-armed San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department officers decked out in paramilitary gear took Jake and Rebecca into custody on suspicion of murder and conspiracy after descending upon their home at 6:59 a.m.
Both were driven to the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside to be booked into custody. The husband and wife were incarcerated in Riverside rather than in a San Bernardino County detention center based on the theory that Emmanuel had been killed in Riverside County.
To that point, it had been the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department that had been steering the investigation, although in some respects, the media had gotten out in front of the authorities. When early in the probe one of the sheriff’s detectives had referenced inconsistencies in Rebecca Haro’s account of what had occurred, bloggers followed by social media commentators followed by crime-focused television program hosts took that as license to press the narrative into one that cast the Haros as being directly involved in action that entailed deliberately or inadvertently harming or even killing their son and then engaging in an elaborate ruse including making a false report of a kidnapping to cover it up. In some respects, the characterization of the Haros as monsters was overblown or at least premature. Remarkably, with regard to at least some of those details offered in the barrage of sensational coverage, what was revealed was accurate.
After the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department made the arrest, the Haros were delivered into the custody of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department at the Presley Detention Center in downtown Riverside for processing.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is vying, as strict law-and-order Republican, for California Governor in the 2026 election. Despite voter registration numbers that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats throughout California, Bianco is hopeful that if he can indeed capture the Republican nomination next year, he can use his law enforcement experience and conservative bona fides to run a successful campaign that capitalizes on what he has characterized as the Democrats’ permissive philosophy and soft-on-crime approach to convince enough conservative Democrats as well as moderate/centrist “Blue Dog” Democrats to support him to move him and his wife, Denise, into the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento for at least four and maybe eight years.
While the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department was able to provide enough damning information with regard to the Haros to obtain an arrest warrant, its investigators had come up short in cinching the case together by producing Emmanuel’s body and demonstrating that either one or both of the Haros had placed that corpse where it was found. This gap – a crucial one – in the case against the mother and father presented Bianco and his department with an opportunity to, if not outright steal, then redirect the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s thunder and the lightning it had in a bottle by locating the body.
By 8 a.m. on August 22, the Haros had arrived at the Presley Center. They were not, as is normally the case with those arrested on murder charges specified in an arrest warrant issued by a court, immediately booked and processed. 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 County Sheriff’s Department an opportunity to carry out undercover operations – consisting, in the case of Jake, of a male deputy masquerading as another inmate or, in the case of Rebecca, a female deputy assuming the guise of a woman incarcerated with her – aimed at getting them to make an admission or offer some information that would lead to determining where Baby Emmanuel’s body is.
In undertaking the operation, Bianco was running a risk. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects American citizens from being compelled to testify or offer evidence against themselves. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution offers a criminal defendant further protections, one of which is the right to representation by a lawyer. Under established case law, agents of the government, which include investigators for a law enforcement agency, are prohibited from directly questioning a suspect or indirectly obtaining statements from a suspect or arrestee who has asked for an attorney or who is already represented by an attorney. In the case of Jake, he was previously represented in the 2018 criminal case that concluded in 2023 by an attorney, Vincent Hughes, who had given indication on August 16 that he was yet Jake’s legal counsel. Moreover, the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office, which is chartered with offering representation to indigent criminal defendants such as the Haros, had temporarily assigned Brian Cosgrove, who heads the public defender’s office’s complex litigation division, to represent both Jake and Rebecca. Thus, it appeared that an undercover operation of the sort the sheriff’s department embarked upon was impermissible and that even if one or both of the undercover deputies succeeded in obtaining incriminating statements from one or both of the Haros, those statements would not be admissible at trial. Bianco’s calculation, however, was more along the lines that either the mother or the father might spill where the child was buried. Finding the corpse would put the final touches on the case, Bianco figured.
It does not appear the undercover operation achieved the sought-after result.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department emphasized that no other arrests had been made, and no other suspects remained outstanding. Nevertheless, the department had interested itself in Jake’s mom, Rachel Cosentino along with Jake’s stepfather, Scott Costentino, the owners of the home in which Jake and Rebecca resided and who lived in another home in Cabazon, at 48875 Taos Road.
Over the weekend of August 23/24, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, in conjunction with San Bernardino County investigators moved onto a second stratagem in trying to extract information from the Haros, again scheming to utilize the press/social media to, in this case, trick Rebecca into making an admission. Late on August 23, word spread among several social media sites 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. 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. Saturday night, select members of the media were given heads up that they would get a glimpse of something important if they made it to a specified spot along the 60 Freeway east of Moreno Valley the following morning.
On Sunday, August 24, 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. The coterie of reporters, photographers and videographers who had shown up were under the impression that the discovery of the dead child’s remains was imminent. They observed, from a distance, the suspect and the investigative team walking along the fire roads and pathways on the hillside near Gilman Springs.
Videos and photographs of Jake accompanied by investigators walking along the rustic trail in the Gilman Springs area were posted to social media sites by late afternoon and early evening Sunday. 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. Copies of those newspapers were left lying around at various places on the 7th floor of the lockup, that portion of the facility 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.
A report that spread rapidly via the internet was that Jake had told a fellow inmate that he had killed Emmanuel and disposed of him in the trash.
Reports surfaced that the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department had grounds to believe that Emmanuel was dead as early as August 4 and that the child had been disposed of in the trash shortly thereafter. The department focused for a time on the possibility that the child’s body was somewhere in the Lamb Canyon Landfill near Beaumont Republic Services.
Investigators asked Republic Services, the trash hauler which has the refuse handling franchise for Cabazon, to trace which truck, precisely, had been responsible for trash pickup on Ramona Street and ascertain what time the truck had offloaded at the Lamb Canyon Landfill, believing detectives might learn from the landfill’s operators which disposal area had been open for franchise operators during the timeframe in question – August 4 to August 14 – and whether a log existed that would show the time of the arrival of particular trash trucks. Based on this, the investigators were looking to narrow down where in the landfill the child’s corpse might be located. Several days had passed after Emmanuel’s alleged abduction and detectives making contact with Republic Services and the landfill operator. After investigators surveyed the landfill in an effort to delineate a section of the landfill where the body could conceivably be located, assuming that it had been hidden in the trash ultimately dumped there, it was concluded that conducting a search operation in which a reasonable chance of finding the body would be too monumental of a task.
Reports with regard to the undercover operations the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department targeting Jake and Rebecca, ones based on impeccable sources within both the sheriff’s department and the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, surfaced in the traditional press and media by Monday, roughly simultaneous to the revelation that the excursion to Gilman Springs had not led to the discovery of Emmanuel’s body.
On Tuesday, August 26, the Haros were in the courtroom of Judge Gary Polk for their arraignment on the murder and filing a false police report charges. Ultimately, those proceedings were postponed when the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office, concerned that as the case progressed differences might arise between Rebecca and Jake, sought a postponement to determine what arrangement could be made to bring in a defense attorney to represent one or the other to avoid a representational conflict for their legal team.
The following day, August 27, with what had been the Emmanuel Haro kidnapping case having transformed into a murder case that was garnering regional, statewide, national and international attention, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin called a press conference. Going into the conference, Hestrin faced a mélange of difficulties that were not of his own making but rather ones that had been handed off to him by the San Bernardino County and the Riverside County sheriff’s departments. One problem was both departments had provided information to and planting stories with the press, traditional television and radio media and social media outlets which had created a frenzied atmosphere which had primed the larger public for the prosecution of the parents, but which had also fueled speculation about the nature of the evidence that was plain inaccurate. A second problem was that the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department had arrested the pair somewhat prematurely, prior to all of the elements of the crime having been established. A third complication was Sheriff Bianco’s gamble on the undercover operations targeting the defendants that had been initiated in the jail and had not produced anything tangible in terms of evidence or confessions. A fourth issue was the combination of the effort to fool Rebecca into confessing by publicly displaying her husband in the Moreno Valley Badlands and simultaneously falsely implying to the public at large, through the manipulation of the press and the media, that authorities had discovered the child’s lifeless body when that was, in fact, not the case.
Having called the press conference, Hestrin sought to, and initially succeeded in, controlling its flow. He made a series of statements, providing a narrative in which the Haros were depicted as having killed their child and thereafter engaged in perpetrating a false clam relating to the abduction to obfuscate their culpability and mislead the investigators. The crowd of reporters on hand, consisting in large measure of the establishment/legacy/traditional press was generally politely respectful of the district attorney, in no small part because of the widespread perception that the Haros were guilty of all they were being accused of and perhaps even more. Skillfully, Hestrin utilized questions about Jake Haro’s previous conviction on child abuse charges to vector the press corps’ focus to the horrific nature of the crime alleged and the nature of the criminals the two sheriffs’ departments and his office were dealing with. He shunted aside, glossed over or deflected questions that touched on the Riverside Sheriff’s Department’s undercover operation, reports that Jake had confessed to killing his son accidentally or purposefully or suggestions that the lack of body compromised the strength of the murder case. He insisted that there had been no confession in jail, while leaving the issue of undercover operations unaddressed, and stated, “We have a pretty strong indication of where the remains of Baby Emmanuel are.”
It appeared that Hestrin, by his gravitas and the deference the establishment media accorded him, had successfully stood down the questions that had surfaced with regard to the case before they mushroomed into critical doubts that might have clouded or would perhaps undo the public perception of the Haros’ guilt, which as a consequence of the leaks regarding the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department investigation had grown so overwhelming only a week before.
Well into the press conference, however, Ahmed Bellozo, a new wave citizen journalist who lacks formal journalistic training and depends primarily on instinct, gumption and tips pouring in from virtually anywhere that may or may not be well-grounded in fact, rose to ask just how solid the assumption that Emmanuel is dead. Bellozo, whose style consists of wielding a microphone to question public or private figures he believes might be knowledgeable or have some insight with regard to issues of public interest while his accompanying videographer records the exchanges, was as aggressive with Hestin as he is with the subjects he interviews for his Tic Tok Channel “On The Tira.” Having sensed that the Baby Emmanuel story was one that would garner for him not only local viewers but ones from the entire Southern California region and beyond, across the continent and perhaps both oceans, he had assumed, early on in his coverage of the matter that the Haros were guilty of murdering their child. He had generated on his own videotaped evidence that cast doubt about Rebecca Haro’s claim of being assaulted and having her child taken from her. He had energetically traced leads that had originated with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department to churn up penetratingly suggest the Haros were at the center of their son’s disappearance. He had gone out on a limb and reported that they were guilty of murdering their son. When Hestrin said the prosecutor’s office and the investigators working the case had a good idea about where the body was, Bellozo interpreted that to mean the body was in hand and a soon-to-be completed forensic examination would vindicate his reporting to that effect and the criminal charges that were lodged against the pair.
Pressed so directly on the issue and flushed out of the position of ambiguous suggestion he had assumed, Hestrin had to back off what he had said earlier, acknowledging Emmanuel’s death had not been confirmed through the discovery of his corpse.
He then lashed out at Bellozo, telling him he needed to give his investigative efforts a rest.
For the legacy and establishment media present in the room and those watching it on video, the exchange between Hestrin and Bellozo was jarring and sobering. It was followed by a protracted lecture from Bianco who excoriated the media for its gullibility for latching onto speculation or suggestions by other members of the media and its unwillingness to accept at face value and as authoritative the versions of events offered by officialdom and law enforcement. Bianco, seemingly disregarding that the media over the previous week-and-a-half had widely and trustingly spread the word provided to it by law enforcement personnel, stated that the media, by its constant questioning, independent investigative efforts and seeking to fill in the gaps in the narrative of what had occurred in the Haro household was “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.”
While the display of anger by the district attorney and the sheriff at the press and social media over its intense interest in the case did not erase, for the most part, the generalized belief among the press corps that the Haros, more likely than not, had some involvement in the disappearance or death of Emmanuel, the two officials’ reaction threw into stark relief their insistence that they had enough evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jake and Rebecca Haro are murderers of their own child. Indeed, with Bianco stating with such conviction that the media was interfering with his department’s investigation, it raised a question as to whether the murder charges had been prematurely lodged.
More pointedly, however, the entire episode forced many in the press and media to consider the degree to which the law enforcement entities involved in the case – both sheriff’s departments and the district attorney’s office – had taken for granted that they could manipulate the media and press, both individually and collectively, to do their bidding through a selective release of information bordering on the provision of misinformation in its effort to fool, trap or otherwise implicate the Haros. When elements of the media inquired as to what was true and what was not, Bianco suggested that such questions were tantamount to assisting the defendants. Given the previous coverage that emphasized the mounting evidence of guilt on the part of the parents and the constant drumbeat across the entire media spectrum calling for the Haros’ arrest, media executives became alarmed that the public might have come to perceive the press as lapdogs who could be snapped into line by being shamed for not simply parroting what they were being told by the police. National and international journalists, who had previously seen Bianco as the head of one of the involved investigative agencies, took stock of the consideration that he was a politician looking to convert a conviction into the governorship of the country’s largest state, began eying him with a jaundiced eye, the precise opposite of what he had hoped to achieve by lecturing the press on August 27 in the aftermath of Bellozo’s inquiries.
Over the next several days, the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office elected to remain as Jake Haro’s legal counsel, assigning deputy public defenders Allison Lowe, who oversees the office’s complex litigation division with Cosgrove, and Paulette Garthwaite to formulate his defense under the supervision of Cosgrove. To ensure that no conflict between the husband and wife emerges and neither will be disadvantaged by having a legal team with divided loyalties, Jeff Moore of the Riverside-based law firm of Blumenthal & Moore will represent Rebecca.
On September 4, the Haros, who were separated from each other to prevent them from communicating with one another when they were brought into the courtroom of Judge Gary Polk, were arraigned. In contrast to the previous frenzied atmosphere in which their guilt was assumed, the proceedings were dealt with expeditiously, with the murder and filing a false report charges read against them and not guilty pleas entered.
Moore gave indication of an upcoming motion to move the proceedings against his client out of downtown Riverside to the courthouse in Banning, which is geographically closer to Cabazon, where the prosecution is set to allege the murder took place.