California: 17-Year-Old Mother and Her Baby Killed

A gruesome sixfold murder in the middle of California. A 17-year-old mother and her baby have been brutally shot in the head. The crime took place in a small town called Goshen in Tulare County. Drug criminals are suspected, according to police.

Men sneak onto the property at night – that’s when the horror begins

With the help of two eyewitnesses who fled and surveillance cameras, it was possible to reconstruct how two men crept onto the property of a residential building at around 3.30 a.m. local time on Monday night. Then, one by one, the deadly shots were fired. When the first police officers reached the scene of the crime shortly afterwards, they were presented with a terrible picture.

A family horribly killed

The door of the house had been kicked in, and a dead man lay in the hallway. The young mother apparently tried to run away with her six-month-old baby, police said. Her lifeless body was later found in a ditch, the dead child cradled in her arms.

“It wasn’t a classic petty criminal”

At least two fugitive suspects are being sought, presumably with links to gang and drug crime. “I think it’s directly related to the cartel,” Sheriff Boudreaux told the Los Angeles Times. “This level of violence – it was not a classic petty criminal.” Such a “horrible massacre” rather points to nefarious professional killers.

Investigators are looking into a possible link to a search of the home a week ago that led to the arrest of one person and the seizure of firearms, marijuana and methamphetamine.

Goshen as a well-known spot for drug smuggling

According to the newspaper report, the village of Goshen has around 5,000 inhabitants, most of them with Latin American roots. Although – or perhaps because – only half a million people lived in the agricultural district of Tulare County, it played an important role in drug smuggling from Mexico to the United States. The area has been a smugglers’ paradise since at least the 1970s.