Three bodies were found in a burning SUV in Orange, California, in 2015, and a man convicted in the killings has been sentenced in the case (KABC).
An Arizona man will spend the rest of his life in prison for the murders of four men, three of whom were found in a smoldering SUV in a California neighborhood in broad daylight and a fourth shot in his own car miles away, in a Mexican drug cartel-linked bloodbath.
Raul Gastellum Flores, 33, learned his fate on Wednesday in Orange County, California, for the murders of Fernando Meza, 20, Antonio Medina, 19, and brothers Edgar Berrelleza, 26, and Joel Berrelleza, 35, prosecutors announced in a news release.
Flores was convicted in April of four felony counts of first-degree murder, four special circumstances of murder during the commission of a robbery, and four special circumstances of multiple murders, authorities said.
During the trial, Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Harris Siddiq described the carnage that day in November 2015 as one of the victims was burned alive in the torched GMC Yukon.
“Their skin melting … in the middle of the day in front of a high school,” Siddiq said of the victims, City News Service reported. “This was a plan carried out by people motivated by greed and a thirst for power.”
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said the murders were carried out to “maximize the terror for the murdered while maximizing the pleasure for the murderers.”
“Someone who takes such delight in taking the lives of others as a hired gun is someone who should not spend a single minute more outside the walls of a California state prison,” Spitzer said in the news release.
The series of events leading up to the murders started on Nov. 9, 2015. Flores and several accomplices went to an apartment in Orange and held up Medina, Meza, and Edgar Berrelleza at gunpoint, forced them into the Yukon and held them hostage as Flores called Rosario Adan Roman-Lopez, the now dead orchestrator of the plot, who told him, “he knew what needed to be done,” prosecutors said.
With Flores driving the SUV, the gunmen shot Meza and Medina multiple times in the head and chest, authorities said. Edgar Berrelleza was shot in the head and back multiple times before the gunmen exited the SUV and got into a waiting vehicle, prosecutors said. Flores continued driving the Yukon, with the three victims inside and eventually stopped on a residential street in Orange, more than 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
There, he doused the victims in gasoline and used a cigarette lighter to torch them, The Orange County Register reported Flores later admitted to investigators.
The SUV caught fire while he was still behind the wheel, prosecutors said. At one point, he jumped out of the moving SUV as it burned and Flores fled to the waiting sedan. Cellphone video captured the horror as the SUV rolled onto a sidewalk. A man who identified himself as Mike told the Register the SUV rolled up onto his driveway and he tried to put the fire out with a fire extinguisher.
“Oh, my God, it’s a body,” Mike recalled when he looked into the vehicle, the newspaper reported. “It was pretty gruesome and right at my doorstep.”
Prosecutors said after Flores hopped into the sedan, he went to an apartment in Orange where Roman-Lopez and others had tied up Joel Berrelleza and had taken over $60,000 worth of heroin, money and safes, authorities said.
Flores and an accomplice then forced Joel Berrelleza into his own Pontiac and shot him in the car while they were driving and recorded his dying breaths on a cellphone, prosecutors said.
Police from the city of Orange were called just after 2 p.m. that day to the burning SUV that bystanders had been dousing with a garden hose. Firefighters put out the flames, and authorities discovered the charred remains. Authorities learned that Meza, who had been shot and stabbed and had his hands bound, was still alive when the fire started. The coroner found soot in his lungs. He died from the gunshot wounds and the fire, officials said.
Police found Joel Berrelleza’s body six days later in his Pontiac in Fontana, nearly 50 miles away from the crime scene in Orange. Law enforcement was called after a passerby reported a man sleeping in the vehicle for several days.
Authorities quickly learned who was involved and why the murders happened. They said Roman-Lopez ordered the hits after Edgar and Joel Berrelleza cut him out of their drug dealing business run by the Sinaloa Cartel, prosecutors said. So Roman-Lopez recruited Flores to carry it out. Flores traveled from Phoenix to Orange County, armed with several handguns and AK-47s, “to steal tens of thousands of dollars from the Berrelleza brothers, and to murder them if they refused to pay,” prosecutors said.
Authorities learned that Roman-Lopez was murdered in Mexico months later as payback for the Southern California killings, prosecutors said. Authorities said they have warrants for the arrests of two others who are still being sought in the California cases.
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