A Fresno man pleaded guilty Thursday to killing a family of five, four of whom were U.S. citizens, two years ago inside their Tijuana home.
Christopher Baltezar Hernandez, 27, was convicted of one count of murder conspiracy and five counts of stalking resulting in death for his part in the slayings of the family, which had recently relocated from Fresno to Tijuana. His co-defendant, 22-year-old Tijuana resident Victor Armondo Aguilar, pleaded guilty to the same charges in October.
In their plea agreements, the men admitted to ambushing the family inside their home while armed with a .223 caliber rifle and a revolver. They shot the mother and her 8-year-old daughter in the kitchen. The woman’s husband tried to barricade himself inside a bedroom with two more children, ages 9 and 4. The gunmen shot them through the door, barged into the room and shot each child once more in the head.
Before his plea, Baltezar Hernandez had faced the possibility of being sentenced to death if convicted, though prosecutors still had six months to decide if they would have sought capital punishment. With his guilty plea, that potential outcome is off the table.
Prosecutors indicated in both agreements that they’ll recommend a judge sentence both men to life in prison.
The victims of the shooting, which occurred Dec. 3, 2021, were a Mexican man, Gerardo “Jerry” Moreno, who had previously lived in Fresno but was deported in 2019; his U.S. citizen wife, Jazmen Hernandez; the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Sofia; and Hernandez’s children from a previous relationship, Andrew Lewis Morales, 9, and Anamarie Jasmine Morales, 8. All three children were U.S. citizens.
Prosecutors revealed for the first time in Baltezar Hernandez’s plea agreement that Jazmen Hernandez was the intended target. The killers “agreed to murder (her), with the knowledge and understanding” that the other victims would also be at the home.
Beyond that, prosecutors have not indicated a motive for the slayings, though online court records from Fresno County Superior Court indicate Baltezar Hernandez and Jazmen Hernandez had some sort of prior connection. The duo filed domestic violence restraining orders against each other in 2019, though both cases were dismissed when neither showed up for scheduled court hearings.
Prosecutors first laid out the gruesome details of the killings in Aguilar’s plea and largely repeated the same facts in Baltezar Hernandez’s agreement. According to those documents, Baltezar Hernandez was already planning the attack in October, when he “purchased numerous parts necessary to build a .223 caliber AR-15 rifle.”
After building the fully functional “ghost gun,” he searched Google for information about how to clear a jammed rifle and watched at least 10 videos “related to tactical firearms training,” he admitted in the plea agreement.
The two men also began researching the area where the victims lived several months prior to the slayings, according to the plea agreements. They admitted that in the two weeks before the killings, they searched for the victims’ address on Google Maps more than 200 times.
On Dec. 2, Baltezar Hernandez went to a store in Fresno and purchased two revolver speed loaders, then set out on the roughly seven-hour drive to the San Diego-Tijuana border, according to the plea agreements. The next morning, he drove across the San Ysidro Port of Entry with the rifle, .223 caliber ammunition and the speed loaders in his Toyota Corolla.
Once in Tijuana, he headed to Aguilar’s residence, and from there the two men illegally purchased a revolver, according to the plea agreements. That night, the two men dressed in dark clothes, put on gloves, drove to the home and barged inside, where they carried out the killings.
Aguilar’s plea agreement states “Hernandez carried the assault rifle” into the residence. In an effort to avoid being caught after the slayings, Aguilar sold the rifle, revolver and speed loaders.
An FBI affidavit in a separate case in Fresno showed agents identified Baltezar Hernandez as a suspect within about 10 days. Two weeks after the killings, agents arrested him while serving a search warrant at his Fresno home, where they found firearm ammunition and silencers that a previous criminal conviction prohibited him from owning.
He pleaded guilty to firearm charges in that case and was sentenced to 10 months in federal custody. Two months after his guilty plea in that case, while still in custody, a federal grand jury in San Diego handed down the indictment against both men. Aguilar was arrested in January in Arizona.
