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#Buried in the Backyard
#Buried in the Backyard
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00:00There's some part of your human nature that just wants you to believe.
00:16He's going to close the shop up, they're not going to murder him, and he's going to walk out alive.
00:25But that's not what happens.
00:30I know two of the three people that know what happened, and they're not talking, and they're not giving us any information.
00:39Her attorney approached us and said, she wants to talk to you.
00:46Dan and I knew that something was very wrong.
00:51Once we saw these text messages, we saw the deliberate plan that was being formulated.
00:56We have a potential kidnap for ransom.
00:58Listen, something bigger is going on here.
01:03The coroner was able to determine that this was a homicide, but they were not able to determine a specific cause of death.
01:11What she ended up telling us, I never saw coming, and I would never have guessed it in a million years.
01:17The Mojave Desert.
01:37It is a vast and forbidding landscape.
01:51The terrain, the habitat is brutal.
01:54There's no shade out there.
02:00It's hours and hours of just desert.
02:06And you have everything.
02:07It's very private, if you want it that way.
02:10The Mojave Desert, it is known bodies do get dumped there.
02:16The initial information we got pointed us in a direction just north of Barstow, off the 15 freeway.
02:30In my career, I've been a city detective.
02:33It's all shooting scenes, stabbing scenes.
02:35I've never had anything where we had to go out and search the Mojave Desert.
02:40The amount of space, it was just overwhelming.
02:46We had helicopters.
02:48We had ATVs.
02:50We had 40 people looking for a body.
02:53One of the dogs alerted and ran to a barbed wire fence that's almost collapsed right next to the road.
03:03Once we got there, got out of the car, you could smell death before you.
03:09The remains were not identifiable.
03:12There was some sand covering the body.
03:15You could see kind of half of a torso kind of sticking out.
03:21I think there was only one arm.
03:23I couldn't see any legs.
03:29The animals in the area had partially consumed the body.
03:35From just being there, standing there, I didn't have a clue as to the cause of death.
03:40You can try to get away with murder, but the truth always seems to catch up with you.
03:53When people think of Los Angeles, they think of big names, they think Hollywood, they think stardom.
04:10But in reality, it's a lot of working class people who are trying to survive and make a living.
04:15From downtown Los Angeles in the West Adams neighborhood, it's just south of the 10 freeway, a bit west of USC.
04:23Our neighborhood is family-oriented, a lot of children.
04:31It's friendly, it's welcoming.
04:34It's a very close-knit community.
04:36I got separated from my husband almost 10 years ago, and I chose to keep the kids and raise them.
04:48And I had to work hard.
04:50In 2020, my oldest son, Joseph, was 22 years old, and was attending USC.
04:57Gabriel, 18, a senior in high school.
05:01And then Juan was 21 at El Camino College, transferring to USC.
05:05I made it an effort since the beginning to be involved in my son's lives.
05:15We spent as much time as we could together.
05:18We have a love for running, so we did a lot of marathons.
05:24We're very close and very connected.
05:26We all live together.
05:29I love how my three kids, and we all have a great bond.
05:33But the bond that Juan and I had was different.
05:35He was always closer to me.
05:44In 2020, Juan attended El Camino Community College.
05:48He was studying to become an electrical engineer.
05:51He had hopes and dreams.
05:54He was working to make a better life.
05:56Breaking news, Los Angeles County now joining San Francisco and ordering people to stay at home.
06:07Ten million more people being told now to shelter in place.
06:12These are the empty freeways of Los Angeles during rush hour, which would normally look like a parking lot.
06:18Juan became unemployed, just like thousands of other people.
06:24One day he came home and said that he had found a job at a dispensary.
06:29The dispensary was about 20 minutes from home.
06:36He would work five days, six days a week from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the shop.
06:44It was an ideal job.
06:45I wasn't the happiest of moms.
06:47But he had to work.
06:49He was trying to save up for school, so all I could do was support him.
06:53September 22nd, 2020, about 2 p.m., I came home to find Juan, getting ready to go to work.
07:06I said, baby, I'm not going nowhere.
07:08Take my car.
07:10We said our goodbyes with a hug and a kiss, and I love you.
07:14I woke up to a text about 10 p.m., and it was Juan texting me, mom was up with my shift.
07:25I'll see you soon.
07:26I replied, okay.
07:32Wednesday morning, I woke up, realized that I fell asleep, that I didn't see Juan.
07:37So I go to his room.
07:40I open the door, and the bed is still made.
07:44I run downstairs to my parking structure, and then I realized my car's not there.
07:55And then that's when all red flags went up.
08:01I think the world stopped for me in that moment.
08:05He'd never not come home, never leave me stranded.
08:10We share locations on our cell phones.
08:13His location is off.
08:15This is not normal.
08:17So I called LAPD, and I said my son didn't come home.
08:22This is not in his character to do.
08:24I can't get a hold of him.
08:27I want to follow a Mrs. Persson report.
08:29And I'm told I have to wait 72 hours.
08:36It was heartbreaking.
08:40For me to sit there for three days and just wait, just the thought of it was driving me crazy.
08:46This is a college student who's 20, 21 years old, who's only been missing for eight hours.
08:54It's very likely that he could have just gone somewhere and forgotten to tell her.
08:58That first night, I go on social media, and I make a post.
09:03Juan hasn't come home.
09:05He's driving this car.
09:06If anybody was with him, please reach out to me.
09:10And hours went by, and no one reached out.
09:13We were all at home, worried.
09:17My sons were overwhelmed.
09:20Emotions were everywhere.
09:23That was the worst night of my life.
09:26It's like, how do I go to bed not knowing where my son is?
09:34The next morning, I called the dispensary multiple times.
09:38But they're not answering.
09:39And I start thinking, I won't wait 72 hours.
09:44So I go to the police station, and it was closed due to COVID.
09:49So I'm on the phone, and I'm outside.
09:53And there was an amazing officer that answered the call this time.
09:57He said, you know what, ma'am?
09:58This sounds serious.
10:00I'm going to push this to the missing persons unit now.
10:09The missing persons unit begins checking hospitals, checking the jails.
10:14It's not something you can kind of answer or kind of finish immediately.
10:18It takes time, especially during COVID.
10:20I'm thinking of every little thing that could have happened or went wrong.
10:30So I went to the dispensary.
10:36As I go in there, I talk to the security guard.
10:40He reached out to someone that at the time I knew as E.
10:45Juan had mentioned this person before, said that he kind of managed the shop, gives him my number.
10:51And then E calls back.
10:54Again, I repeat the whole story.
10:56My son didn't come home, and he says, we closed the shop, and he left.
11:00I said, I see you have cameras.
11:02Let me check your recordings.
11:04And he says, oh, the cameras are live.
11:07They're not being recorded.
11:10Wait a minute.
11:11You're selling marijuana.
11:13It should be mostly cash transactions.
11:16You don't want to keep an eye on your business when you're not here?
11:19And he said, no, I told you.
11:22It's live feed.
11:22I don't want to have problems with the police.
11:24I can't help you.
11:30While missing persons continue to do their standard checks, Ms. Hernandez was vocal in the community.
11:36She was out there.
11:36She was passing out flyers.
11:40I start calling family.
11:42I start reaching out to friends.
11:44We post it on social media.
11:46The message starts going out, and 1,000 shares, and 5,000 shares, and 10,000 shares.
11:52And people are reaching out from everywhere.
11:55Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has an idea as to where Juan might be.
12:00Thursday morning, I remember my phone in my hand, and a message comes through.
12:14They said they had Juan.
12:17If I didn't give them $7,000, they would kill my son.
12:21And in that moment, I stopped breathing.
12:37Do I pay?
12:38Do I not pay?
12:39Do they have him?
12:40We believe that his life could be in danger.
12:43Three people, they're cleaning up something the morning of the 23rd.
12:46And that's when we said something bigger is going on here.
13:03I'm getting ransom messages from multiple members saying that if I didn't give them $7,000,
13:09they would kill my son.
13:11And my mind just starts racing.
13:13So I called LAPD.
13:16The supervisor called me, and he told me, he goes, hey, we have a potential kidnap for ransom going on.
13:22It was Ms. Hernandez who reported her son Juan Hernandez missing a few days earlier.
13:29We communicated with Ms. Hernandez, and we had her meet us at our office.
13:37Obviously, there's that, do I pay?
13:38Do I not pay?
13:39Do they have him?
13:40We believed that there was a potential that his life could be in danger.
13:45So immediately, we prepared search warrants on his phone records, on his credit cards, his social media, just so we could find out where he's at.
13:56From search warrants on Juan's phone, we knew the last place that it was was in the area of the dispensary.
14:02A little bit after 11 o'clock, his phone shut off, and it never turned back on.
14:07That's concerning and suspicious.
14:0920, 21-year-old kid constantly in contact with his mother.
14:14His phone's not going to be off.
14:16Dan and I knew that something was very wrong.
14:19We started our standard procedure to verify the messages.
14:25We learned Ms. Hernandez's car had been found.
14:29So at that point, we have multiple things going on with the case.
14:32But really, our best lead is the car.
14:36Ms. Hernandez's car was found two to three miles from the dispensary.
14:40And that area where it was located, it's a very high crime, prostitution, gang area.
14:46It's a rougher part of town.
14:48Could this be some sort of gang involvement?
14:51Could he have left and been robbed?
14:54We didn't know at this point.
14:56We processed the car, and we ended up getting nothing of evidentiary value.
15:02No fingerprints of an unknown person.
15:04No viable samples of DNA to test.
15:07And then we received results on the extortion.
15:13And we found out some of the senders were on another continent, in another state.
15:21And we've seen the exact same verbiage and the exact same texting nuances before
15:27in other extortions or kidnapper ransoms.
15:31Based on that, we were confident it was all just a scam.
15:35It's actually very common.
15:36We explained to her how the scam works.
15:39Of course, she wants to find her son and puts flyers up.
15:43But when it's a personal phone number, that's what opens it up to these people who are preying
15:48on vulnerable people.
15:51Scams are coming in.
15:52But at the same point, I'm like, how do I differentiate a scam from reality?
15:57I need to know my son's okay.
15:59It was hard to ignore the messages.
16:02I was just overwhelmed.
16:03At that time, we knew that that kidnap investigation was not going to go anywhere.
16:09She was receptive.
16:10But at the same time, she's still frustrated because it didn't fix the main problem, which
16:16is Juan is missing.
16:17From the beginning, we knew that Juan had been at work.
16:24But from there, we didn't know what had happened to him.
16:27But what we were focused on was Ms. Hernandez had spoken to someone at the dispensary.
16:34He said, the cameras don't record and don't get the police involved.
16:38For someone to say, don't get the police involved, it concerned us very much.
16:43We had taken a drive by to see what the dispensary looked like.
16:46So I knew that there was a lot of cameras.
16:49We needed to get in there, get that camera system, and see what we had.
16:54So that day, I started writing a search warrant for the location of the dispensary.
17:04Juan's mother continues her efforts throughout this period of time.
17:10I'm here today, enticing the public to come forward, to give us any information in regards
17:18to my son, Juan.
17:21It's still COVID, but the community came out of hiding.
17:27And that's where I gathered the strength to keep going.
17:31When the warrant came in, we knew if we show up at the dispensary and they're open, they
17:43would secure the location and we'd never get in and evidence could be destroyed.
17:47We purposely went there very early and waited a few hours.
17:52We wanted people to show up with the keys, but nobody showed up at Juan's dispensary at
17:59that time.
18:00We didn't know any of the employees that worked there to get in touch with them.
18:03The door was so fortified that we could not get it open.
18:06We had a forced entry into the dispensary.
18:10Once we got inside, we had fanned out.
18:13We saw the DVR took it and we left our search warrant information in the dispensary.
18:25The dispensary had video.
18:27He told Ms. Hernandez, they only have live feed.
18:30So it was obvious he lied to her.
18:34There's no video before September 22nd.
18:37It starts on the 23rd.
18:40Obviously, that's suspicious.
18:42Why is there no video before the 22nd?
18:44The night Juan goes missing.
18:45And I see in the video from the morning of the 23rd, three people and two are cleaning
18:55up something off the ground.
18:58I'm like, wait a minute.
18:59What am I looking at here?
19:00What is this?
19:01We get the video from the dispensary where Juan Hernandez worked.
19:22And there's no video before September 22nd.
19:27It starts on the 23rd.
19:29And I see a video of three people.
19:35They're cleaning up something in the dispensary the morning of the 23rd.
19:39That's when we said, oh, something happened in there.
19:43Something bigger is going on here.
19:48Based on the video, the very next day, we went back to the dispensary to process the location
19:54as a potential crime scene.
19:56We came with our forensic technicians.
20:03We had them fingerprint.
20:04We had them photograph.
20:05We had them use luminol to test for blood trace.
20:11There was not a spot of blood in that dispensary.
20:15But what were they cleaning up?
20:18We were back at square one.
20:21At this point, we needed facts on Juan.
20:23The only thing we knew for sure is that his phone died at that location.
20:28So we knew, okay, something happened at the dispensary.
20:35Behind the employee counter, they had phone numbers.
20:37And so we got the phone number to the security guard at the location.
20:41We called them.
20:42From the beginning, we had suspicions about everybody that was at this dispensary.
20:47Also the security guard.
20:49He told us Ethan Estefan was the manager.
20:52We learned Ms. Hernandez had spoken to Ethan.
20:56She described him as E.
20:58And we were able to tell that he was one of the people in the video from the cleanup.
21:04We saw an alarm system at the dispensary.
21:07And we did a warrant for the account holder.
21:11It had two people on the account.
21:13Ethan Estefan and James Payne as owners of the location.
21:16Talking to the security guard, we had found out that he was one of the last people to see Juan alive.
21:29He said he was working that night.
21:30He left the location and Juan had remained there with Ethan and James.
21:35Looking into James' background, there wasn't much.
21:43He was of Chinese descent, had never been arrested for anything.
21:49It was the same with Ethan.
21:51He had minimal rap sheet, if any.
21:53We put a tracker on his car.
21:56We just wanted to keep tabs on him at that time.
21:58But we learned that on September 30th, the week after Juan disappeared, that James Payne traveled to Turkey with his girlfriend, Sunita Payne.
22:10We also learned that he bought the ticket to Turkey the same day he left.
22:19I was thinking, James fled.
22:23I couldn't prove that yet, but that was what I was thinking.
22:27Once we identified James, we were able to tell that he was also one of the people in the video from the cleanup.
22:33There was a female in the video that was doing some cleanup, and we were trying to figure out who she was.
22:45LAPD detectives got video from LAX that James Payne had a companion, and he bought a ticket with a companion, and that was his girlfriend, Sunita.
22:56She was the third person in the video from the dispensary.
22:59Not long after that, we find out Sunita Hang comes back to the United States without James.
23:09We knew where she was.
23:10We didn't want to talk to her quite yet, because we still didn't know what we were looking at in the video, and we needed more information.
23:23At this point, our world stopped.
23:26Nobody was going to work.
23:28Nobody was going to school.
23:29My sons felt helpless.
23:33It was hard.
23:37Just thinking where my baby is.
23:48There was video before September 23rd, but LAPD didn't have the proper equipment at that time to recover that video.
23:57It was frustrating.
23:58Then one of our civilian employees said, I have the right person for you, call Juan Geraldo at Glendale.
24:10In 2020, I was a detective assigned to the Glendale Police Department.
24:17We got the DVR, and the following day is when we started the process.
24:22It took us eight hours to recover all the data that was on the DVR, there were over one million files that were recovered, but only one to two frames from one clip captured September 22nd when Juan went missing.
24:38Just less than a second of movement.
24:40We started seeing a camera that is pointing down towards the dispensary display case, and we see a male behind there who looks like Juan Hernandez.
24:55And we continued on that camera, and then we actually saw him being taken down to the ground.
25:02This is what happens.
25:04This is what happens.
25:08We start getting a clear picture of the night Juan went missing.
25:14This is a smoking gun.
25:16What she ended up telling us, I would never have guessed it in a million years.
25:33At the dispensary where Mr. Hernandez was working, there were over one million files that were recovered.
25:43I was confident those files were intentionally deleted from the DVR.
25:52On September 22nd is where we started seeing the two individuals struggling with the young man that was behind the counter.
26:04It was one still photo.
26:07I couldn't tell that Juan, at that point, was dead or alive.
26:11But in that moment, I knew we were going to solve this case.
26:15It meant everything.
26:19Wow, this is it.
26:22This is a smoking gun.
26:27LAPD was able to identify the two men that were on top of Mr. Hernandez.
26:32We knew it's just Juan, Ethan Estefan, and James Pang inside.
26:39While Ethan Estefan is choking Juan Hernandez, you see James Pang lean down and there's something weird in his hand.
26:49We all thought it was a cell phone being held by James, but we had no idea what this item was.
26:59It looked like they killed Juan in this video, but I still didn't prove it.
27:04Was Juan just knocked unconscious?
27:06We know who was involved, but we still didn't have a body and we still didn't know why this happened.
27:13Part of us were thinking, but what'd they do with them?
27:20So we also do search warrants on their phones.
27:25Ethan Estefan, James Pang, and Sunita Hang.
27:28They were asking for information and so is every other law enforcement agency in the country.
27:38So it takes time and it's frustrating because obviously we want the information right now.
27:42I think that by the third week I accepted the fact that I wasn't looking for my son.
27:56My son wouldn't have gone three weeks without contacting me.
28:02So I knew that something had happened to him.
28:07And I, for a fact, knew that at this point I was looking for a body.
28:13Grief, I would have never imagined how hard it hits a person.
28:33I'm communicating with the detectives.
28:35But I'm not getting any information other than we're working on it.
28:41And in my mind that, that wasn't enough.
28:47It was hard not being able to share information because we're doing our job, we're detectives, but we're also human.
28:55We couldn't bring her into the fold because it's just, it's very sensitive and we're not sure what direction it's going to take us.
29:01And we didn't want to release some information that later on could compromise the investigation.
29:06I felt bad not being able to tell her, but that's just the way it works.
29:15In early November, phone records start trickling in.
29:19We start getting a clear picture of where James, Ethan, and Sunita were the night Juan went missing.
29:31The phone records led us straight to the Mojave Desert.
29:36When we got the phone records that they had gone to the Mojave Desert in the middle of the night, right after Juan's phone had turned off,
29:44this is the Mojave Desert, bodies are dumped there.
29:47So we knew that Juan was dead and now our focus was we need to find him.
29:53We talked to the detective that does our phone analysis and we came up with a plan of where we were going to start searching.
30:03Jennifer and I gassed up and we headed out there that afternoon.
30:07The phone towers in Mojave Desert are 10 miles apart.
30:1210 miles is huge.
30:13We needed to find Juan. His body was the key to this whole case.
30:18The odds of finding him were probably minimal to zero.
30:20Seven weeks after Juan's disappearance, we're getting the cell phone records.
30:25The Sony to hang Ethan and James' phones are pinging out in the desert that night that Juan disappeared.
30:30And we had a plan of where we were going to start searching.
30:31We made a grid of the 10 miles to zero.
30:32We had a plan of where we were going to start searching.
30:33We had a plan of where we were going to start searching.
30:34We made a grid of the 10 miles in between the two exits, the two cell towers that we knew that they were going to start searching.
30:39We brought 40 detectives.
30:40We brought 40 detectives.
30:42We had a grid of the 10 miles in between the two exits, the two cell towers that we knew that they were in the area of.
30:46We brought 40 detectives.
30:47We went out there from early morning till almost dark.
30:48And we came up blank.
30:49And we came up blank.
30:50We had a plan of where we were going to start searching.
30:52We had a plan of where we were going to start searching.
30:54We made a grid of the 10 miles in between the two exits, the two cell towers that we knew that they were in the area of.
31:06We brought 40 detectives.
31:07We went out there from early morning till almost dark.
31:12And we came up blank.
31:19After a couple of days, on November 15th, 2020, our analysts had narrowed down the scope to an area that we hadn't covered.
31:38We had helicopters, ATVs, we had off-road vehicles.
31:43The San Bernardino search and rescue team had a team of dogs.
31:47There was a slight hill that kind of went down the road.
31:50So the team fanned out and went that way.
31:53Within an hour, that morning, I heard a call over the radio.
31:58They had found something.
32:01One of the cadaver dogs alerted and then she got a little closer and you could smell the remains.
32:13If it was Juan, he had been out in the desert at least two months.
32:18Some parts of the body were covered by sand or rocks, but a substantial amount was exposed to the sun and animals.
32:27They removed the body with a large sifter just to make sure nothing was being lost in the soil.
32:35The state the body was in was almost skeletal.
32:40There was only one arm, partial torso in the head.
32:43There was not a lot.
32:45We were able to see that there was one hand that might be salvageable to get fingerprints off of.
32:52We notified San Bernardino homicide.
32:55They called their coroner investigator.
32:57And then he came out and they extracted the body.
33:07San Bernardino was able to make a cast of the hand and then they roll those fingerprints.
33:13In less than 24 hours, we were able to positively identify Juan Hernandez.
33:22The coroner was able to determine that this was a homicide, but they were not able to determine a specific cause of death.
33:38Two days later, we went and told Ms. Hernandez that Juan had been found.
33:45I couldn't do it.
33:47Dan did it.
33:52I couldn't do it.
33:55And it was tough.
34:04They came to my home.
34:08And then they said,
34:10we found your son's remains.
34:12It destroyed us as individuals.
34:21And it destroyed us as a family.
34:24Yeah.
34:26We're ready to move forward.
34:27It's like, all right, let's, let's finish this.
34:42Once Juan Hernandez was identified, we had enough to get arrest warrants for Ethan and Sanita and James, but he was still in Turkey.
34:49On November 19th, four days after Juan was found, we ended up serving search warrants at Ethan's apartment and Sanita Hang's apartment and arrested them.
35:02When we arrest Ethan, he has his cell phone on him.
35:08In a murder case, you often have to prove intentions.
35:12And it's difficult to do.
35:13You can't get into someone's mind.
35:15Up to that point, we didn't have a clear motive.
35:19But Ethan's messages offered a glimpse into the plan that he and James Pang had been formulating.
35:31The text messages begin with a sort of investigation.
35:35Who is stealing money?
35:36Let's find our suspects.
35:39And then they isolate on Juan Hernandez.
35:42In their minds, they believe that Juan was stealing from them.
35:51There was never any evidence that anyone was stealing money, especially not Juan.
35:57Finally, on September 22nd, James Pang had told Ethan Esophon that he had a plan and that Ethan Esophon was going to be the muscle in that plan.
36:13After Sanita and Ethan were arrested, they are not talking.
36:19But a month later, DA Balian called me and Dan and said he had received a call from Sanita's lawyer.
36:27Her attorney approached us and said, Sanita wants to talk to you.
36:32What she ended up telling us, I never saw coming and I would never have guessed it in a million years.
36:39Once Juan Hernandez was identified, that didn't solve the case.
36:59There was still one piece of the puzzle that we didn't have.
37:04What was in James' hand in the video.
37:06Then DA Balian called me and Dan and said, Sanita wanted to talk.
37:13Sanita had heard a conversation between James and Ethan about killing Juan Hernandez.
37:22Juan Hernandez.
37:23I told him, are you, are you planning on killing someone?
37:27And then he said, yes, because he took his money.
37:31What happened then?
37:32He, he pushed me to the bed and then he said, I lift off him.
37:35I have to do as he said.
37:37What are you upset about?
37:38Because I was scared that James was going to kill me.
37:41Sanita told us James injected Juan with a syringe of ketamine in the dispensary and injected Juan with more ketamine after they had already killed him on the drive up to the Mojave Desert.
38:01He, he's injected Juan's eyeballs.
38:05Ethan was making fun of it.
38:07He said, I was trying to inject it to his eyeball to see if his eyeballs changed.
38:14What we all thought was like a cell phone being held by James.
38:18That was a syringe of ketamine.
38:26I called the coroner and I said, hey, look, we need to test for ketamine.
38:32Initially, as part of the autopsy, a normal drug screening was done, but it did not test for the presence of ketamine.
38:38The coroner ended up finding that the cause of death was both strangulation and ketamine overdose equal parts.
38:48What Sanita had to add to this case was extremely important, but we didn't have James Pang.
38:55James Pang was still out in Turkey.
38:58We learned from Sanita that James was trying to get to China.
39:02We knew that if he made it to China, we would never see James again.
39:08For over a year, the U.S. Department of State worked with authorities in Turkey to have him arrested and extradited back to the United States.
39:18Late November of 2022, the U.S. Marshals went to Turkey and delivered him to me and Dan at LAX airport.
39:26February 9th, 2024, three years after the murder, James Pang, Ethan Esiphon, Stan accused of murder.
39:42During the trial, what the jury heard was on September 22nd, 2020, Juan Hernandez went to work at the dispensary.
39:55And around 11 o'clock at night, Ethan and James arrived.
40:00And after everybody left, Ethan choked Juan and James injected him with ketamine.
40:07Both of what they did killed him.
40:11Sanita drove two and a half hours to the Mojave Desert and they drove two and a half miles on a dirt road.
40:19Dumped Juan's body and covered the body with sand.
40:26Back at the dispensary, they cleaned up and they collected some items of Juan's.
40:35Ethan got into Juan's car and he left it in a high prostitution area.
40:44The next day, they took Juan's belongings, went to Newport Beach and they burned Juan's items.
40:52The jury only took a few hours to deliberate.
41:01Ethan Astiphon and James Pang were convicted of first degree murder.
41:07Ethan Astiphon was sentenced to 25 years to life.
41:14James Pang was sentenced to 26 years to life.
41:18And in exchange for her providing her truthful testimony, Sonita Heng received probationary felony sentence in 112 days in county jail.
41:28I'm happy that we were able to give Ms. Hernandez some answers.
41:42Doesn't change what happened.
41:44But we did it for her.
41:47We remember Juan being kind and always being there for his loved ones.
42:05I'm gonna honor his life by trying to be better.
42:09Because these individuals took his body, but his spirit and his love, all of that remains in my heart.
42:18And you said that the moon was called the moon was called soul.
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