On a two-acre property at 19086 County Road 27, between the town of Sanford and the hamlet of Lasauses, which maps spell Los Sauces, a pit had been dug behind a gray garage. According to a police informant, Adre Baroz walked Selena Esquibel to it at the end of August 2020 and shot her, and she fell in. Her body was burned and the hole filled in with a stolen tractor. The land, about twenty miles south of Alamosa in Colorado's San Luis Valley, belonged to Francisco Ramirez, known to Baroz's crew as Ponch. By the end of that November investigators had found human remains on two properties in the area, and five people from the valley were dead.
Baroz, born October 28, 1994, lived in Alamosa and led a small local gang whose members called him Psycho. He had already served time in the Colorado Department of Corrections, and his record included assaults on police officers.
Esquibel, nineteen, of Alamosa, was the first to die. She was last heard from on August 31, 2020, a Sunday, although prosecutors date the killings from August 25. The informant told investigators that Baroz hit her in the head with a handgun in his apartment on 6th Street in Alamosa that day, then drove her south with the informant to Ramirez's property. Baroz, the informant said, believed she was going around saying that Psycho had raped her. That assault has never been confirmed.
The man who filled in her grave with the tractor, according to the same informant, was Xavier Zeven Garcia of Saguache. His mother reported him missing after he left at 2 a.m. on October 17 in a friend's pickup, going, she said, to collect $2,500 from Baroz. Phone records put Garcia's phone at Ramirez's property an hour later, and at least three witnesses described a man like him arriving there; one said he saw Baroz shoot the man in the chest and the head. Case documents later reported that Garcia's remains had not been found.
Myron Robert Martinez of Del Norte died while buying drugs from Baroz at his apartment. Shayla Hammel of Alamosa, Martinez's girlfriend, was waiting in a car outside, and prosecutors alleged she was killed by Baroz's older brother, Julius, at his instruction. Korina Arroyo of Monte Vista was due to testify against Baroz in a drug case and went missing before the trial. Each victim's age is given differently from one report to the next: Garcia as twenty-four or twenty-six, Martinez as thirty-one or thirty-eight, Hammel as twenty or thirty-four, Arroyo as thirty-one or thirty-two. The records of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation give Martinez's birth date as November 15, 1982, which makes him thirty-seven.
Deputies found the first remains in late November 2020 while working a cluster of missing persons reports, and Baroz was arrested in New Mexico after a manhunt. Only Martinez and Hammel had been formally identified by the spring of 2021; the others were identified over several months as forensic pathologists worked through what the fires had left. The charges grew as each death was tied to the pits. Ramirez was charged in March 2021 with tampering with the remains of Martinez, Esquibel and Garcia, and Julius Baroz was arrested too.
Three and a half years after the arrests, on February 26, 2024, Adre Baroz, then twenty-nine, pleaded guilty in Alamosa to every charge: five counts of first-degree murder, five of tampering with a deceased human body, first- and second-degree assault, and second-degree kidnapping. Julius Baroz pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in Martinez's death, and Ramirez to three tampering counts. District Attorney Anne Kelly called the pleas a tremendous victory for justice in the valley.
On May 3, 2024 District Judge Michael Gonzales sentenced Adre Baroz to five consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, and to 140 more years on the assault, kidnapping and tampering counts. Before passing sentence the judge called him pure evil, words he said he had never used in a criminal case. Julius Baroz received the maximum twenty-five years, and Ramirez twenty-four.