
Left to right: Aranda Briones (Facebook/Justice for Aranda Isabel Briones), Owen Shover (Riverside County Sheriff’s Department), Briones at school (Moreno Valley Police Department).
A California man will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars for the disappearance and revenge murder of a classmate who he blamed for getting him expelled from high school several years ago.
Owen Skyler Shover, 23, hails from Hesperia, a large city in San Bernardino County, located some 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
In January 2019, the defendant killed Aranda Isabel Briones, 16, and then buried her somewhere in the unforgiving San Bernardino Mountains nearby. To date, the girl’s remains have never been found.
On Wednesday, Shover was convicted by a jury of his peers on one count of murder in the first degree, along with a special circumstance of lying in wait. Under Golden State law, special circumstances are essentially sentencing enhancements that, if applied, must result in one of two outcomes: life in prison or the death penalty.