A Sudden Shot: The Phoenix Serial Shooter

Chapter One

Fuzzy Blue Slippers

Petite, naïve twenty-two-year-old Robin Blasnek received a text message from a special friend. It was a hot Sunday night, 10:51 p.m., July 30, 2006:

"come over"

"when," she typed back.

"now"

Robin’s parents were already asleep. She didn’t stop to put on shoes—what if they woke up?—just a spaghetti-strap tank top for the baking Arizona night, a pink one, sweatpants and fuzzy blue slippers. It had been many months since she had slipped out like this at night.

Robin was twenty-two, her parents would later say, but she acted more like she was fifteen or even twelve. They had gotten custody of her when she reached her majority. A special needs child, they planned to take care of her all of their lives.

Blue-eyed Robin, one hundred pounds with bracelets on each wrist, toe rings and anklets on each foot, cell phone in hand, slipped out the back door.

Following the outlines of the roughly L-shaped freeway system, Robin was in the farthest east section, the bottom of the L. At the most opposite possible point to the north and west of her by a good thirty miles or more, a middle-aged construction worker, a proud father to three young sons, was struggling with his conscience. Just a day or two before, Ron Horton had phoned his mother, who was visiting with family in Boston. His sister Rennee recalls the family going silent and gathering around to listen in on their mother’s side of the conversation: I don’t like the way this sounds, Ronnie. You be careful. Oh, Ronnie. Oh dear. No, Ronnie. Now the whole family was worried and no one knew exactly why.

Ron Horton had a Willie Nelson-type grizzliness, with long, graying hair, a mustache with goatee, and piercing brown eyes. He was known for an ornery sense of humor, running with a biker crowd and skyrocketing devotion to his three boys.

On this Sunday night, after he put the three boys to bed in his northwest home, the single father was on the horns of a dilemma. One course of action, he might be jeopardizing all he loved, including the silken faces slumbering down the hall. He might also be betraying a biking bro for no good reason. The other course of action, he might become what amounted to a silent partner in an enterprise of murder.

If only things were more clear. If only things were more safe.

Right between Robin and Ron, in the heart of downtown Phoenix, Cliff Jewell, a veteran of a law enforcement career that stretched from California to Thailand, was turning his detailed mind to a huge stack of files. It was high summer on this night, and he’d been working these files, adding to them till they grew fat and unwieldy, since the turn of the New Year. Jewell, a tall blond man with three grown sons of his own, was a man on a mission.

Robin headed out of the pleasant little residential cul-de-sac, so tucked away and protected, and padded down the block to a slightly larger street. She turned south. In that way of young teenagers, her phone never stopped. Her boyfriend Tremain called. Well, ex-boyfriend. They’d been close for two or three years, but recently their paths had been diverging. She told Tremain she was going over to a friend’s house, but coyly refused to tell him whose. Next she both took calls from and made calls to a couple of girlfriends, reporting her feminine triumphs.

She turned east onto a bigger street. This one was a major thoroughfare.

Up in the Northwest Valley, Ron Horton fiddled with his cell phone. He was waiting for a call. He’d been waiting for it for days now. He felt a frisson when the device chirped and the number he’d been waiting for lit up the screen. It was a text message. The caller had been in Vegas, the message spelled out. Ron was very anxious to continue the conversation.

"Did you win or lose?" he typed in.

Then he stared at the phone.

And waited.

As she trotted down the hot street in her fuzzy blue slippers, the nighttime temperature easily still over a hundred degrees, Robin would have had somewhere in her thoughts both her deeply religious parents and her fun independent life at the home. Not her parents’ home, where her dad took her every Friday night, but the group home where he returned her every Monday morning. She’d made Employee of the Month a few weeks ago at a job she’d gotten through the group home. And she had a lot of friends. She’d had dinner with several a couple of hours ago at the Olive Garden. She continued to text back and forth with the boy she was meeting. He lived with his parents also, and they were asleep as well. It was way too early for that; so much better to be young!

Robin’s parents clearly adored her. Calls to and from Dad this weekend were scattered throughout her phone history. She was their youngest child, the youngest of four daughters. Her name had been chosen specifically to placate her big sister, Rachel, who was three when Robin was born. Rachel was mad that the two older girls had T names, Tara and Tami, and she didn’t. So the new baby got an R name to make Rachel happy. When Rachel was fifteen, she was killed by a drunk driver. Now Robin was the only R name left among the three surviving daughters.

The twenty-two-year-old baby of the family, a special needs girl who loved skiing and ATVs, turned south onto one of the main arteries of the East Valley, Gilbert Road.

Ron Horton’s phone chirped. He got the answer he was waiting for:

"I lost."

Ron typed in another comment and waited.

Thirty miles away from Ron, in the East Valley, a silver Camry turned onto Gilbert Road.

Robin’s nose was buried in more text messages. She expected to have a good time when she arrived. She would not have noticed the same silver Camry passing her again.

And again.

Ron Horton sent another text, hoping to knock loose a response. He stared at the silent phone. It was around 11 p.m. by now, and he figured he was wasting his time.

"You’re obviously busy, he typed. Call me when you’re free."

Robin thought of her friend Robbie. If Tremain was going to be like that, she might as well give Robbie a call, too. She wondered if he’d be up.

Robin was looking for Robbie’s number in her contact list—she hadn’t used it in a couple of weeks—when homeowner Frank Bonfiglio slowed down on Gilbert Road as he approached his own block. Returning from a quick trip to the store, Frank noticed a female, thin and white, walking down the sidewalk. He wondered what such a young girl was doing out alone at night. He didn’t know that less than a mile away her sleeping parents thought she was tucked in her own bed just down the hall.

Frank pulled into his garage.

Robin found Robbie’s number.

Frank pulled out a beer and sat down in the backyard.

Robin reached the end of the block.

Frank heard a loud bang.

Robbie was watching a movie. He never heard the phone ring.

In the corner house one block down Gilbert Road from Frank’s, the Chase family was also watching a movie. All of them heard the same loud pop and went running outside.

They saw a figure in the darkness, kneeling.

Mr. Chase, the father, approached carefully.

Are you okay? he asked. He could see the person was holding a cell phone, attempting to use it.

I’ve been shot, he heard a female voice say.

He ran up to the figure and saw blood everywhere. He started shouting instructions to his children. His daughter called 911. The boys and his wife brought towels and blankets. They soaked up blood with the towels and put the blankets underneath her to protect her from the scalding pavement. They applied pressure to what seemed to be the source of the blood that ranged from her chest to her feet. Mr. Chase cradled her. Robin’s last moments were spent in the arms of a loving father. It was a place Robin knew well, a place that would have comforted her, a place where she always went before she started her biggest journeys.

On Sunday night, after receiving a series of slow and one-word responses, Ron Horton had given up on his text messages.

He dialed someone else. He’s up to something, he said into the phone. He always responds right away and writes a whole book. Ron said he wasn’t going to text any more tonight, the conversation was too forced. He’d try again another time.

Early Monday morning, before the shooting reached news-rooms, Ron Horton’s phone rang: a twenty-two-year-old girl had been shot while walking—at 11 p.m.—from her home to a boyfriend’s.

At 11 p.m.

Ron felt the bile rise. Now he had blood on his own hands, he would later say. He vowed he would do whatever was in his power to stop this. He could have saved Robin Blasnek, he felt, if he had just tried harder.

Ron Horton never got over it, not to his own dying day.

Police and rescue arrived in front of the Chase home within minutes. All the neighbors had collected around the now unconscious girl, everyone doing what they could to help. Many people heard the shot and came running out of their houses. Police unrolled yellow tape, paramedics started revival attempts, and sirens and flood lamps pierced the night. Police fanned out, searching the streets, their radios buzzing with constant com muniqués; a massive canvassing effort was started.

By the time Robin’s ID was established at dawn, one investigative lead had already been stopped, searched, interrogated, GSR’d, released and crossed off from the list. Even the lead himself was very cooperative. You’re just doing your job, he told detectives during his own interrogation. Anything I can do to help. He was just someone who had driven through the crime scene but had not lingered when he saw so many people already gathered. Spots of potentially suspicious activity in the night—any cigarette butt in a shrub, any moving shadow—were hunted down and evidence researched and bagged, but they were all false leads. Law enforcement was relentless, and the neighbors on the street were eager to help.

As she left this life, Robin was encircled by the best in the human family, people who were willing to comfort her, to attempt to save her, to shower her with the milk of human kindness. Now everyone was searching for the worst in humanity, those who would track us down and kill us all just for sport.

Chapter Two

Love You, Dog, Call Me

A year earlier, at three in the morning on June 29, 2005, in the dark summer heat, Vicente Espinoza-Verdugo of Tolleson loaded up his mom and his sister, and headed out for Jack in the Box. They passed money through the drive-thru window just off McDowell Road and pulled out onto Eighty-third Avenue with the car smelling of Jumbo Jacks and curly fries. As the vehicle’s headlights arced into a southerly direction, they lit up the horrifying form of a dead body sprawled across the sidewalk.

Heart pounding, Espinoza-Verdugo turned the car around and went straight back to the Jack in the Box. He ran inside and told the cashier there was a dead body just outside the restaurant. Then he pulled out his cell phone and called Phoenix Police.

The cell phone records the time of this call as 3:19 a.m., June 29, 2005.

All personnel—police and paramedics—who responded to the call could see the devastating trauma to the head of the victim on the sidewalk: the unknown male was pronounced dead at the scene by firefighters at 3:33 a.m.

Inside the victim’s pocket, officers found a handwritten note: Love you, dog, call me, never throw this away.

A hundred feet away from the body lay a guitar.

At the Circle K on the corner, out of the way of investigators, officers from Phoenix and Tolleson pored over jurisdictional maps. Cross-checking one another and defining the crime by the location of the body, not the guitar, or the other miscellaneous items found, such as loose money, a gym bag and some CDs, the officers concluded it would be a case for the tiny Tolleson Police Department.

By eight feet.

A short time into the budding investigation, the Tolleson police officers putting up crime tape were disrupted by a call to the Burger King a short block north of the scene of the homicide. The Burger King was not open for business overnight unlike the Jack in the Box. A security company had called in that an alarm had gone off in the night and a window had been shot. The officers found bullet fragments in the play area, among the children’s play sets, behind a large window painted with cartoons. A large hole now punctuated the big blue thumb of the clown character facing the street on the outside of the window.

But soon the Tolleson detectives determined that the restaurant was on the other side of the jurisdictional line, and they handed it off to Phoenix Police. No one had been hurt at the Burger King.

They returned to the homicide across the street.

By one thirty in the afternoon, the fingerprint lab of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, or the state troopers, called with an ID from the victim’s fingerprints. The white male with a bullet in his chest and in his head had been twenty-year-old David Roy Anthony Estrada.

Now that they knew who he was, detectives took out the slip of paper found in David’s pocket and called the number of the person who had assured David, Love you, dog, call me, never throw this away.

A man answered. The Tolleson detectives said they needed to speak with him and it needed to be in person. They arranged to meet at a Chevron gas station in Central Phoenix, almost twenty miles from the scene of David’s death.

The officers’ log states, A white male approached me [at the Chevron] and identified himself as James Carlos McCormick, a cousin of David Estrada. He stated he was from California and had come here to help the mother Rebecca Estrada locate her son to get him into a mental institution.

When the detectives called, cousin Carlos must have been anticipating that David had either gotten into a scrape and been ashamed to call his mother, or had been found disoriented and lost.

Instead, Detective Rock informed him of the boy’s death.

McCormick asked me several times if I was sure of the identification of the body, wrote Detective Rock. It took some time before cousin Carlos could accept what Detective Rock had to say. He didn’t believe me, said Detective Rock later. But, after all, not only did they have the fingerprints, they had the note: McCormick had to know there was only one pocket in which that note could be found.

When Carlos McCormick finally seemed ready to believe, Detective Rock asked him for help in giving the sad news to David’s mother.

Rebecca Estrada doted on the strikingly handsome boy who was her only son. His five sisters doted on him, too. Two of those girls were just twelve and fifteen on this terrible night. They lived in a large and comfortable home with columns in the front and a custom tile embedded on a post at the curb. It was in a very good neighborhood, even prestigious, located at the foot of Squaw Peak, one of Phoenix’s treasured desert mountains. Until four years earlier, the family had been headed by Ralph Estrada, a successful lawyer. Rebecca, a devout Catholic, loved her stay-at-home life taking care of the children.

On the day her nephew came knocking on the door with two Tolleson police officers, however, the family was subsisting on Rebecca’s new job as an airline reservations clerk. Mr. Estrada’s career as a prosperous attorney had come to an end when he pleaded guilty to fraud, was disbarred, and entered an Arizona prison.

Just sixteen at the time of his father’s fall from grace, David had been popular, athletic, and movie-star handsome. He loved music and taught himself to play guitar. But then the family’s life changed drastically. They couldn’t sell the house because it was encumbered by liens related to Ralph’s fraud case. Ralph couldn’t contribute at all from prison. So Rebecca got herself a $12,000-a-year job, and extended family chipped in to help her and her minor children get by.¹

Extended family also helped Rebecca cope with David’s increasing difficulties. By the time the boy was eighteen, a heart-broken Rebecca had successfully petitioned a judge to have her son committed. David completed his inpatient treatment, but a few months after he was released, Rebecca was despondent to see him again slipping away inside an erratic mind. In the summer of 2005, David could have gone home to the big white house with the columns and custom tile at the foot of the mountain, but when officers first found him dead on the sidewalk near a makeshift campsite on a vacant lot in Tolleson, they assumed he was a homeless person.

To Rebecca and those adoring cousins and sisters, David was anything but homeless.

The Tolleson detectives drove to the big white house and informed Rebecca of the boy’s death. We conducted a limited interview with Mrs. Estrada, states the incident report, because she was obviously upset over the death of her son.

They called a priest to her house and left.

It had been 4 a.m. when Tolleson detective Ron Rock, a good-looking man with a full head of blond brown hair accented by a tuft of white on the left side of a widow’s peak, was roused from sleep and called to the scene of the young man found at the Jack in the Box. He ordered that the body be left where it was until sunrise, because he wanted photos taken in better light. We never considered robbery as a motive for that crime. It was obvious he wasn’t robbed—he had money in his pockets, he hadn’t lost any property, the detective said.

While Rock was at that scene, he received a call from an animal control officer with more bad news. Sometime during the night, while David Estrada was strumming his guitar under an open sky, over on the rural Westside, a children’s pet, a quarter horse named Sara Moon, had been shot dead with a .22-caliber rifle.

No one connected David Estrada, Burger King, and Sarah Moon.

Neither was anyone thinking about Tony Junior Mendez or Reginald Remillard, two names that had been entered into the Phoenix Police blotter the month before. On May 17, Tony’s death had gone something like this:

A house without air-conditioning, even as early as May, can be brutal during the overnight hours in the sprawling desert metropolis.

Tony Mendez, thirty-eight, was thinking about a family he knew that had lost their electric service. He knew they would be miserable without air-conditioning through the desert night. He discussed it with his roommate, Ricky Kemp. Together, they planned to visit the family and bring some candles. We didn’t really know ’em, says Ricky. We just knew they didn’t have power and they had kids. Late in the evening of May 17, 2005, found Tony Mendez rummaging through Ricky’s house for candles. At least he could bring the family some light, both for their eyes and their hearts. As Tony’s sister Paulina said, He never left the room without throwing a joke at you.

Tony, who was separated from his wife and family, had been rooming with Ricky for about a year. They had grown up in the same neighborhood. Ricky considered him like my brother. The two often worked together in a repair shop and installing drywall.

On this night, they hooked up a little trailer of Ricky’s to Tony’s bike.

I went inside to get some water bottles, Ricky says, tearing up. He took off without me.

Tony pedaled along, perhaps carefully selecting the right jokes to cheer up what he knew would be sweaty, forlorn children and stressed-out parents. Lost in his reverie, Tony didn’t notice he was being followed.

Two blocks behind, someone watched.

Tony cleared a pothole and aimed for the next street lamp.

Someone else was aiming, as well.

Tony had recently taken the first steps toward reconciliation with his wife. He hoped to reunite with his children soon.

Life was definitely on the upswing. Tony began to whistle.

Then someone squeezed a trigger.

Marcos Portillo got home at the same time every night from his job as a custodian. On May 17, 2005, he turned the corner from Encanto on to Forty-eighth Lane at 10:55, saw nothing of interest and no other traffic, and pulled into his own driveway two houses up. He went inside and showered. Fifteen minutes later, he went outside into the warm night to water the lawn and light up a cigarette.

That’s when I saw this person, laying sideways on top of his bicycle, just laying there. I started to run to him because I thought he needed help, but when I got about five feet away from him some other people came into the street and said, ‘Don’t touch him.’ I knew they were right, because at first I thought maybe he was drunk and passed out, but when I got close I could see it looked like he was dead.

Ricky Kemp was standing in his carport figuring out whether to try to catch up with Tony when some other friends from the neighborhood materialized out of the darkness. At first, he couldn’t understand their emotional response at seeing him.

Someone’s dead over on Forty-eighth, they said. We saw that trailer on the bike that we know is yours. We thought the dead man must be you.

Now Ricky felt the impact of their statement. He knew who had been pulling that trailer. He rushed over to the scene. Police were already there. They had at first assumed the man was either a heart attack victim or perhaps had been hit by a car. But when paramedics turned him over, they discovered a small bullet hole in his shirt. It went straight through his heart. When Ricky Kemp walked up to the scene, just blocks from his own house, he told the 911 responders the name of the man they would not be able to revive.

Detectives scoured Tony’s life for clues. They rounded up informants and lowlifes and got nowhere. The case went cold, very cold.

A week later, fifty-six-year-old Reginald Remillard, a man beloved by two sisters and a brother, wearily sank down on a bus bench on Camelback and Seventh Avenue, a spot close to the strip of high-rises along Central Avenue as well as to neighborhoods. It was also across the street from a bar called Charlie’s, a plain building with just one basic sign.

Reginald had a sweet oval face and sparkling eyes, and he’d served his country in Viet Nam. That was a time when he was still big brother to the other kids. But he was choppered out in 1971, when he developed schizophrenia. As a child he would take care of me, his sister Becky Lewis later testified, then our roles reversed.

Reginald’s perception of people and things altered. He couldn’t think through consequences. And Reggie had developed a fondness for sleeping in the open air. As we got older, I felt responsible for him, Becky said. All his siblings saw Reginald at least once a week and frequently conferred on his living situation and options. This particular spring, Reggie had complained to all of them that he didn’t like the assisted living facility he was currently in. He wanted a change. The devoted three siblings worked through all the paperwork and phone calling and meetings that entailed, and arranged for Reggie to be transferred to a place he would like better.

On May 23, 2005, big brother Reggie, for whom some days were better than others, took his place in a hospital transport to be taken to his new home, something he’d wanted for several weeks and that his brother and sisters had worked hard to achieve for him. Described as very spiritual, Reggie felt no one could hurt him. At a stoplight, dressed in hospital clothes, Reggie let himself out of the vehicle and fled.

We had calls from him, Becky testified. He told us he was fine. But we told him it wasn’t safe.

Late in the evening found Reggie on his favorite open-air bed, a bus bench. This one was at Seventh Avenue and Camelback, just in front of a strip mall with Japanese fast food, a submarine sandwich shop, a beauty products outlet and a Blockbuster Video, and just off a major Central Avenue intersection that saw its fair share of the city’s elite in frequent trade. It was a nice cozy spot. The bus bench even had a little roof. Perfect.

Reggie took off his tennis shoes and settled in.

That night thirty-one-year-old James Hernandez, a sharp dresser with dark good looks, went to see the new Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, with a friend. After watching Anakin Sky-walker evolve into Darth Vader, the two men walked over to Charlie’s bar. By 1 a.m., the pair were done shooting pool and stepped out of the building. They stood on the sidewalk, on the south side of Camelback, discussing their next move. They were thinking of walking a few blocks north to another bar. James had his back to Charlie’s, while his friend had his back to Camelback Road. Directly in James’s line of sight, as he looked at his friend, was a man on a bus bench across the street.

James’s conversation was interrupted by a loud blast. He and his friend froze, putting their arms out in a defensive posture, wondering if more shots would ring out and they might be hit. A light-colored vehicle passed them westbound on Camelback Road.

Across the street, James watched the man on the bench crumple.

The two moviegoers ran across the street.

At first, I wasn’t sure just what was going on, James testified. The first thing I remember when I got across the street was looking around for a sprinkler because I was hearing the sound of a sprinkler, like gurgling. But I couldn’t see the sprinkler that was making the noise. Then I smelled blood and I realized the sound was coming from the man on the bench.

James illustrated by moving his hand in an arc. It was blood coming out of his neck, swoosh, like a fountain.

James called 911, but before his call had been processed through dispatch, Officer Darren Burch was pulling up to the intersection of Seventh and Camelback. He saw a man frantically waving him down and screaming. Burch pulled into the side parkway of the strip mall, not knowing what the trouble was. He had not heard from the dispatcher; he just saw the hysterical man trying to get his attention. Burch left his vehicle and approached the agitated man, whom he could now hear screaming, Someone’s dying, someone’s bleeding! When Burch got close, I saw someone laying on the bus bench shooting a stream of blood in a fountain effect from his neck. He was faceup, his eyes were open and he was extremely gray. On the ground underneath him was a very large pool of blood, six feet or more in diameter. Soaking in the pool of blood—a pair of tennis shoes.

Officer Burch, in an amazing moment of ingenuity, reached down for one of the shoes. He knew with the rate the blood was coming out, the difference between life and death was a matter of seconds.

I grabbed the rubberized tip of the tennis shoe and placed it in the nape of his neck to stop the bleeding.

Officer Burch wasn’t even a hundred percent sure the victim was alive, he was so gray and still, his eyes unfocused. But at the rate the blood was shooting out, Burch assumed there was life to pump it. After the rubber shoe blocked the fountain of blood, the gray started to subside, the eyes came back into focus and he started looking up at me. ‘Stay with me!’ I told him.

At the same time, Officer Burch had no way of knowing what had happened, what role the two unharmed but agitated men had played, and holding the shoe in the victim’s neck, he could not reach his radio for more help.

The scene was gruesome and chaotic.

But James had already called 911, not knowing Officer Burch would show up by chance, and soon more help arrived anyway. James Hernandez leaned over the victim, who was growing pinker and more alert, and urged him over and over to hang in there, hang in there. And the Viet Nam vet with a severed carotid did hang in there. Paramedics arrived to relieve Officer Burch’s effective but brutally makeshift first aid.

The big brother of the Remillard clan hung in there for six days more, but in the end, nothing as small as a rubber shoe or as big as a whole hospital could save him.

Some six months or so earlier, Phoenix Police detective Clifton Jewell had been called out to a death scene. He found a woman who had obviously committed suicide, but he had a hard time figuring why. He traced her purchase of ammunition earlier in the day and found her cache of bullets. Accounting for what she had done to herself, several bullets were missing. He immediately went out to check on her family. He was greeted at the door, he was happy to see, by someone who was both alive and uninjured. But the person gestured behind him, to a television screen, where reporters were describing a bloody discovery in Tolleson. Cliff’s instincts had been correct—there had been murders before there was a suicide.

Cliff picked up the phone and called Ron Rock, the Tolleson detective he’d seen on the screen. You looking for Naomi? he said. ’Cuz I’ve got her.

Both veterans of their respective departments, this was the first time the two detectives had ever met. Their impression of each other was favorable, and just as in any other business, networking plays a role in police work. After David Estrada’s death, Detective Ron Rock called Cliff Jewel and picked his brain a little on the subject of ballistics.

Ron Rock was also fielding calls from David’s mother, who had saved various voice mails intended for her son, whose whereabouts she didn’t know at the time the calls were received. Now the calls seemed sinister. Transients in the area began feeding to the detective stories of drug deals and debt collections. One informant sent him on a fruitless journey to a nonexistent address. A mysterious blue truck entered the story. It was tracked down; it belonged to a friend of David’s, but the most they could learn here was that a female friend had been with David up until 11 p.m. the night of his death. She told detectives that David was avoiding going back home because he feared being institutionalized again. She thought he was headed to Mexico.

Others thought he was headed to San Francisco. David’s friends from St. Mary’s High School told various tales. The detectives drove up to Camp Verde, a half-day drive up and back, to lean on an investigative lead who was in custody up there for a hit-and-run. Turned out he had been behind bars since May 5 and had nothing to offer but rumors that were almost two months out of date with David’s death. Everyone with a grudge against someone else phoned in theories. Everyone with a sin lied. Weapons were seized along the way, tested and eliminated from the investigation.

David’s family went looking for leads themselves. A friend of David’s had a dream about what had happened, and Rebecca sent one of her adult nephews out to look for the locale and characters described by the dreamer. An older stepson went to the crime scene and vigorously questioned local transients, collecting more vivid tales that went nowhere in the cold, hard light of day.

One sad entry in the police file reads, I attended the funeral of David Estrada [today], where a family member approached Rock in the halls of St. Francis Xavier with a list of names and phone numbers that David had called from his mom’s cell phone . . . and he thought we should have this information.

Months passed. The blistering summer turned into fall. Christmas came. No one was any closer to knowing what had happened to David.

Or to Reginald or to Tony, for that matter.

Or to a guy named Nathaniel Shoffner.

Chapter Three

I didn’t want to get shot.

Stephanie Bartlett

At 6 p.m. on the evening of June 28, 2005, before David Estrada had arrived at his makeshift campsite on Eighty-third Avenue, about two miles away a commercial truck driver named Richard Bergman brought his kids out to see Sara Moon, the quarter horse he’d bought for them less than a year earlier. She was a beautiful deep bay color. He had her boarded at a wonderful little pasture on the outside edge of Tolsun Farms. The Berg mans drove over twice