By james art MORENO VALLEY, Calif. – A man who killed a 16-year-old Moreno Valley girl because she kicked him out of school and hid her body somewhere in the San Bernardino Mountains was sentenced Friday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A Riverside jury in August convened just one day before convicting Owen Skyler Shoover, 23, of Hesperia, of first-degree murder and a special-circumstances charge of lying in wait for the 2019 death of Aranda Briones.
During a hearing at the Riverside courthouse Friday, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Timothy Hollenhorst imposed the sentence required by law.
Shoover’s brother, Gary Anthony Shoover, 27, of Hesperia, pleaded guilty last March to being an accessory after the fact under a plea agreement with the District Attorney’s Office. He was sentenced to 12 months probation.
According to District Attorney Mike Hestrin’s lawsuit, Aranda and Shaover attended Moreno Valley High School in the fall of 2017.
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The victim was a “troubled” boy whose parents were absent and she was adopted by her grandfather, Carl Horscott, and lived with him since the age of 3 at his home on Via Vargas Drive, according to the brief.
Hestrin said that on the morning of Nov. 7, 2017, Aranda decided to join her friends, including Shawver, at Community Park instead of attending classes. A sheriff’s school resource officer looking for runaways spotted the teenagers in the park and went to talk to them, causing the youths to run off in different directions.
Shawver was holding a small-caliber handgun and threw it at Aranda, yelling at her to hide it. The victim got scared and immediately threw it into a drain. However, the deputy spotted her in the act and later detained and questioned her along with school administrators, at which point she revealed that Shoover was the one with the gun, Hestrin said.
The matter came before the local school board in February 2018, and members voted to expel Aranda and Shoover. She enrolled in a nearby continuing school while Shawver moved from her mother’s home in Moreno Valley to her father’s residence and enrolled in a continuing school in Hesperia. But he was enraged at being banished and at what he apparently perceived as Aranda’s betrayal.
Detectives with the sheriff’s Central Homicide Unit later discovered a series of Snapchat, Facebook and other conversations initiated by the defendant from November 2018 to January 2019 during which he attempted to purchase a firearm, the statement said. the brief information.
He ended up getting one.
On Jan. 12, 2019, Shawver contacted Aranda via text message, inviting her to join him the next day while he made drug deliveries and “robbed drug dealers,” the brief said. She agreed to meet him at Bayside Park and the two made contact shortly before 5 p.m. on January 13, 2019. Hestrin said that with two of her friends watching, Aranda got into the defendant’s Nissan Versa and he and she heads north toward Box Mountain Springs.
She posted several photos on social media within an hour of her and Shawver in his car, expressing her excitement at being with her “friend” who was letting her do some of the driving.
Through “pings” from the cell phone tower, Moreno Valley’s camera system and security cameras installed outside homes in the area, the occupants of the Nissan were tracked around Box Springs Mountain for about 20 minutes. Court documents say the vehicle turned north on San Bernardino shortly before 6 p.m., in the direction of a mobile home park.
While en route, Shoover contacted his brother via Facebook, saying, “Be ready for tonight. Prepare shovels and lighter fluid,” according to the short description.
Defendant pulled Gary Shoover out of the park and the two headed north toward the San Bernardino Mountains on State Routes 138 and 18. Between 8:33 p.m. and 10:14 p.m., defendant turned off his cell phone, rendering its signal unreadable. It reactivated after he reached his father’s home at 16210 Grevillea Street, prosecutors said.
In the weeks that followed, Aranda’s family and friends filed reports with the sheriff’s department, believing she had encountered foul play. The investigation was initially conducted as a missing person investigation, but it “became a homicide investigation (as detectives discovered extensive and compelling evidence that the defendant meticulously planned and executed Aranda’s murder), the brief said.
One of the highlights involved a search of the Nissan, during which a Luminol blood detector was sprayed into the trunk, indicating “the presence of a significant amount of blood that had pooled toward the bottom of the trunk, under the carpet,” according to Hestrin.
DNA was taken from the vehicle and he said it was ultimately determined to be a match to Aranda.
Neither Owen nor Gary Shawver had any previous convictions.
Law enforcement personnel and volunteer groups have searched the mountains where they believe Aranda’s remains may have been dumped, but no trace of her has ever been found.
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