Suspect pleads not guilty to killing 6 people in California
2023.02.08 08:52
Suspect pleads not guilty to killing 6 people in California
By Kristina Sobol
Budrigannews.com – Six people, including a baby and his adolescent mother, were executed in a farming town in central California last month. One of the two suspected members of a gang pleaded not guilty to six counts of first-degree murder on Tuesday.
Stuart Anderson, a spokesman for county prosecutors, stated that during an arraignment that was conducted via video feed in Tulare County Superior Court, Noah David Beard, 25, entered his plea and was given the order to remain held without bail.
It was the first court hearing in the case since Beard and his co-defendant, 35-year-old Angel Joseph Uriarte, were taken into custody last week after being under constant surveillance for approximately a week and a half.
According to Anderson, Uriarte, who was wounded in a shootout with federal agents prior to his arrest, will be arraigned at a later time and remains in custody under medical care.
During a pre-dawn home invasion on Jan. 16 in the agricultural community of Goshen, about 35 miles southeast of Fresno, the two men are alleged to have shot and killed six people, five of whom belonged to a single family. Mike Boudreaux, the sheriff of Tulare County, has referred to the attack as a deliberate massacre.
The majority of the victims were shot in the head, including Rosa Parraz, a 72-year-old grandmother who was found kneeling at her bedside, Nycholas Parraz, who was 10 months old, and Alissa Parraz, who was 16 years old.
The sheriff said that surveillance footage from security cameras showed the teen running out of the house with her son in her arms, then lifting the child over a fence and running over herself before they were killed. They say that Beard shot them.
Eladio Parraz, 52, was identified as one of the three additional victims; 49-year-old Jenna Analla; and 19-year-old Marcos Parraz
The specific reason for this is still under investigation. However, authorities claim that the murders appear to be linked to gangs.
According to Boudreaux, both of the defendants are members of the Nortenos, a predominantly Mexican-American gang network affiliated with the Nuestra Familia, Spanish for “our family,” a prison-based criminal organization. He claimed that two Parraz family members belonged to the rival Surenos, a prison gang affiliated with the Mexican Mafia.
As California, which is known for having some of the strictest gun laws in the country, faced a series of deadly mass shootings, the murders brought attention to rising gang violence and drug trafficking in some of the state’s more rural and isolated areas.
One week earlier, gunmen went on the first of two rampages in California, killing 18 people in Monterey Park, a Los Angeles suburb, and Half Moon Bay, a coastal town in the San Francisco Bay area.
