Yolo County Sheriff Tom Lopez and Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig announced Sunday an arrest in connection with the 2007 death of a baby whose body was found in a rural Yolo County waterway.
The suspect is also believed to be responsible for the homicides of four other infants under the age of six months, officials said in a brief news release.
A news conference is scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday at the Yolo County Sheriff’s Office in Woodland to discuss the suspect, whose name and relationship to the victims will be disclosed at that time. Representatives of the California Department of Justice and FBI will also be present.
The body of the deceased infant was found March 29, 2007, by a fisherman in the waterway just east of the City of Woodland. Coroner’s officials positively identified the baby in October 2019, the news release said.
Here is the Davis Enterprise’s coverage of the discovery, from April 1, 2007:
The remains discovered last week in an irrigation slough east of Woodland were those of an infant no more than 3 months old, Yolo County sheriff’s officials said Friday.
Now the sheriff’s department is enlisting a forensic anthropologist from UC Davis to determine more about the baby, such as its exact age, race and gender, and possibly its cause of death.
Investigators also are on the lookout for a potential murder suspect.
“We are treating the case as a homicide, unless it’s proven otherwise,” Lt. Jeff Monroe said Friday following an autopsy on the badly decomposed remains, which had been reduced to just bones. “That’s how much importance we’re placing on finding out what happened.”
Monroe said the infant’s body was inside a container that had been submerged in Conway Slough, near County Road 22, for at least six months when 31-year-old Brian Roller of Rio Linda found it while bowfishing Thursday afternoon.
“That pretty much ruined the day,” Roller, a plumber, said Friday night in a phone interview. “I just hope they can catch somebody and figure it out.”
An avid fisherman, Roller usually bowfishes in the Natomas area but said he is “always looking for new fishing water.” He said he spotted the slough one day while en route to a plumbing job in Woodland and thought it would be a good source for large carp.
At about 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Roller aimed his bow and arrow at what he thought was a fish swimming in the murky water, and fired.
“It obviously wasn’t a fish, because it didn’t swim away with the arrow,” Roller recalled. He said he began pulling at the item by the string attached to the arrow, but it was very heavy, and he was unable to bring it ashore without breaking the string.
Instead, Roller retrieved a shovel from his truck and used it to pull the container to the slough’s bank. Upon opening it, he found some miscellaneous items — which apparently had been used to weigh down the container — and the remains, wrapped up in a blanket.
“I pretty much assumed they were human by the way they were packaged together,” said Roller, who did not elaborate. “As soon as I saw the first truly identifiable bone, I called 911.”
Monroe, the sheriff’s lieutenant, has declined to describe the container, saying that information is a crucial part of the investigation. He did say that the container also held a decomposed diaper, indicating the infant had been cared for at some point.
Several weeks later, sheriff’s officials announced the agency had submitted the infant’s DNA to the Department of Justice in hopes of obtaining an identity.
Meanwhile, Sunday’s announcement comes roughly a year and a half after the Yolo County Coroner’s Office announced the solving of two other cold cases through DNA technology — that of a man who drowned in the Sacramento River in 1987 while attempting to save several other people whose vehicle had plunged into the waterway, and a Sacramento woman whose body was disposed of in the Yolo Bypass in 1984 after she was killed by shotgun fire.
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