Adre Jordan Baroz was twenty-six when he was arrested in November 2020 and twenty-nine when he was sentenced. He lived in Alamosa, in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, a high, sparsely settled farming basin where the largest town has under ten thousand people, and he identified himself as the leader of a small local gang. He was known as Psycho. Beyond that, his background has not been set out in the public record and this entry does not fill it in.
Prosecutors dated the killings from August 25 to November 13, 2020. According to the arrest affidavits, the first victim was Selena Esquibel, nineteen, of Alamosa, whom Baroz believed was going around saying that Psycho had raped her. He then killed a woman who had been an accomplice in that murder and who was due to testify against him in a drug case; the affidavits give her age as thirty-two, and prosecutors identified Korina Arroyo, thirty-one, of Monte Vista, as the fifth person charged. A man and a woman who came to his apartment to buy drugs were also killed. The five he was convicted of killing are Esquibel; Arroyo; Myron Martinez of Del Norte, whose age is given as thirty-eight in the charging documents; Shayla Hammel of Alamosa, given as twenty; and Xavier Zeven Garcia, twenty-four, of Saguache.
The bodies were dismembered and burned. One of the men was cut up in a motel bathtub, where investigators later found blood in the drain. The remains went into burn pits on two rural properties between the town of Sanford and the community of Los Sauces, about fifteen miles north of the New Mexico line, and what the fires left was so little that some of the dead were identified from their teeth.
Deputies found the remains in November 2020 while investigating a cluster of missing persons reports. A manhunt followed and drew national attention; Baroz was arrested at a motel in McKinley County, New Mexico, later that month. Martinez and Hammel were formally identified in December 2020, and the charges grew through 2021 as the other three were connected to the pits. His brother Julius Anthony Baroz and CJ Walter Dominguez were arrested in January 2021, and Francisco Ramirez in the spring, on tampering counts for helping to dispose of and burn the bodies. Baroz was held without bond at the Alamosa County jail throughout.
On February 26, 2024, in an Alamosa courtroom, he pleaded guilty to thirteen counts: five of first-degree murder, five of tampering with a deceased human body, first-degree assault with a deadly weapon, and kidnapping. On May 3, 2024 Judge Michael Gonzales sentenced him to five consecutive life terms, telling the court before doing so that he was pure evil, words the judge said he had never used in a criminal case before. At the same hearing Julius Baroz, who had stood by while his brother tried to cut a victim’s throat before shooting him, was sentenced to twenty-five years with credit for more than 1,200 days served, and Ramirez to twenty-four years on three tampering counts. Twelfth Judicial District Attorney Anne Kelly said afterwards that crimes of this kind were almost unknown in a community that small, and that the valley’s emptiness was part of what had let him operate.
Five convictions, five victims, all named. No further death has been attributed to him. The victims’ ages are given differently in different reports, and this entry uses the figures from the charging announcements where they conflict.