LOS ANGELES — After a predawn gun battle and a series of raids across Tulare County, authorities said Friday they had arrested two men accused of killing six people, including a teen mother and her baby, in an execution-style massacre that stunned the Central Valley farm town of Goshen last month.
The suspects were identified as 25-year-old Noah David Beard of Visalia and 35-year-old Angel “Nanu” Uriarte of Goshen. Uriarte engaged in a gun battle with federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives early Friday morning and was wounded before being taken into custody. Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said Uriarte, who is likely to face federal charges for assault on a federal officer, was undergoing surgery at a hospital and is expected to survive.
Investigators identified Beard as the suspect accused of killing the 16-year-old mother and her baby.
The Tulare County district attorney’s office has charged both suspects with six counts of murder and a series of special allegations, including committing the murders to further activities of criminal street gang and using a firearm by a felon.
Beard and Uriarte are both Norteño gang members, authorities said.
The arrests were part of Operation Nightmare, Boudreaux said, which included evidence gathering, 24-hour surveillance of the suspects and executing search warrants at three locations in Goshen and Visalia on Friday morning, as well as several state prisons, which targeted eight cells and 16 inmates linked to the Nuestra Familia prison gang.
“We knew every move they were making,” Boudreaux said of the suspects. “We had them under our wing where we wanted them.”
The killings instilled fear in Goshen, an impoverished community in the San Joaquin Valley. In recent years, drug trafficking and gang violence have turned sparsely populated rural areas into some of most violent places in California, but even so the brutality in Goshen shocked people around the country, prompting private citizens from as far away as Maine to donate to a reward for the capture of the killers. Federal law enforcement has been assisting the sheriff’s office in its investigation.
The sheriff also called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to reinstate the death penalty in this case and others in which children are killed.
Boudreaux said two shooters barged into the family compound on Harvest Avenue about 3:30 a.m. Monday, Jan. 16, hunting and killing six people, including a 72-year-old grandmother in her bed, a 16-year-old mother and her infant. The sheriff singled out those three as innocent victims but said some members of the household were involved in gangs.
Most of the victims were related to one another. Coroner’s officials identified the dead as Rosa Parraz, 72; Marcos Parraz, 19; Eladio Parraz, 52; Jennifer Analla, 50; Alissa Parraz, 16; and 10-month old Nycholas Parraz.
Rosa Parraz was the grandmother of Marcos and Alissa. Eladio Parraz was their uncle. Analla was the girlfriend of a man who survived the attack.
Boudreaux said Friday that Eladio Parraz was first to be shot, followed by his nephew, Marcos, who was shot in the head. He said Rosa Parraz appeared to be getting out of bed when she was shot in the head.
Boudreaux said the teen was attempting to escape with her baby clutched in her arms when she was caught and shot in the back of head, execution style.
“This family was targeted by cold-blooded killers,” Boudreaux said at the news conference.
The heinous execution of a teen mother and her baby was unheard of even in a region plagued by years of cartel and gang violence.
