Court records paint grisly picture in missing Hemet teens case

Posted By jose.arballo On November 30, 2009 @ 9:12 pm In Courts, Crime, Local News, News | 3 Comments

A foot discovered in the backyard of a home where two Hemet teens were last seen was severed from a burned leg and left in a fire pit where other human remains were discovered ^[1], according to court records.

The grisly details suggesting someone was slain and the remains burned were included in an affidavit used by Hemet police to search the Bluejay Way home at the center of a homicide case that started with a search for three missing teenagers ^[2].

Among the items collected from the home and backyard were a machete, a spent .22-caliber shell casing, shovel, gas canister, partially burned T-shirt, sock, yellow metal hoop earring and burnt pieces of suspected clothing, according to the affidavit.

“…I concluded the burning dismemberment of human remains had occurred and that the suspect(s) were unsuccessful in destroying those remains,” Hemet Detective Jeff Dill wrote as part of the affidavit supporting the search of the west Hemet home.

The 10-page affidavit gives details about how the case started Nov. 17 with the discovery of a bloody shoe by Elodia Lopez, the mother of Adrian Rios, one of the missing teens, and some drag marks in the backyard of the home. An officer found a Nike tennis shoe that had “dried, reddish liquid on it.” The officer saw two areas in the backyard that appeared to show that something had been dragged, the affidavit said.

Rios and Jose Campos, both 17, remain unaccounted for, and some neighborhoods say a Nov. 15 bonfire at the recently vacated house in the 1400 block of Bluejay Way emitted a powerful stench. Campos had lived in the home for the past two months with his parents, but neighbors told broadcast outlets the home had been vacant for about a week before the night of the bonfire.

Campos’ girlfriend, Felicia Sharpe, 17, ^[3] was initially believed to have been missing, too, but she turned up last week. Police have not commented on what she may have told them about the boys.

Identifying burned remains ^[4] can take weeks, a coroner’s investigator said in a telephone interview over the weekend.

No arrests have been made in the case, and authorities indicated the parents of the missing teens were cooperating with the investigation. A “person of interest” ^[5] was being interviewed by investigators today.

According to the affidavit, Lopez told police she last saw her son Nov. 15 when he left their home in the unincorporated area of Hemet. He did not say where he was going, she told police, and she filed a missing persons report with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department Nov. 16 when he did not return.

On Nov. 15, Lopez told police she went to the Bluejay Way home and found that no one was there. She went to the backyard and found the shoe, which is similar to those worn by her son, according to the affidavit.

On Nov. 17, one officer looked through the backyard and found some burned clothing near a fire pit and drag marks that ran from the patio to the fire pit, the affidavit said. A large kitchen knife was found on the ground, near a rear sliding glass door, along with a roll of plastic wrap.

Eventually, the officers inspected the fire pit area and noticed a large number of flies on the ground and a piece of “biological remains” that turned out to be a human foot. The item was turned over to Alexis Gray, a forensic anthropologist from the San Bernardino County Coroner’s office, who determined the remains were a right foot that had been burned at less than 700 degrees.