The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department announced Monday that arrests have been made in the killings of six people found shot to death in the desert last week.
Mystery still shrouds the slayings, but the Sheriff’s Department is expected to provide updates at a 5 p.m. news conference, including the number of people arrested in connection with the crimes.
The victims were discovered Tuesday night when sheriff’s deputies responded to a wellness check in a remote desert landscape near Lessing Avenue and Shadow Mountain Road, off U.S. Highway 395 in the community of El Mirage.
A long north-south corridor, U.S. Highway 395 runs from Interstate 15 in Hesperia, Calif., through Carson City, Nev., to the Canadian border.
Although officials did not release details about how the people died, video from TV stations showed one vehicle at the scene riddled with bullet holes. The bodies had gunshot wounds, Fox 11 reported. KABC-TV Channel 7 reported that the bodies appeared to be burned. Officials initially said five bodies were found, but a sixth was discovered during the investigation, sheriff’s spokesperson Mara Rodriguez said Wednesday.
The desolate area surrounding the crime scene, about 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles, was littered with cardboard, rubber tires and broken bottles.
Information that investigators have yet to release — including the identities and ages of the victims — will help give a better idea of a possible motive to the slayings, experts say.
“When you see the bullet casings, the number of people who were killed, the fact that the vehicle was left in the middle of the desert without any attempt to hide it, it speaks to a certain kind of audacity that makes you think it’s linked to some kind of organizational crime,” said Peter Hanink, a professor of sociology and criminology at Cal Poly Pomona. “But whether it’s part of Mexican drug cartels, I don’t see evidence for that so far.”
Though some law enforcement sources have suggested the deaths could have resulted from organized crime or cartel violence, Hanink said that cartels are often poorly understood and serve as a “kind of boogeyman” that people automatically think of when crimes of this nature occur.
“If this were linked to cartels, as in international criminal organization operations in the U.S., then almost certainly the FBI and Homeland Security would be involved,” he said. “If drug cartels were suspects, presumably the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] would be involved.”
Times staff writer Summer Lin contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
