A Riverside County judge has ordered Corona residents Hector Saldaña and Rachel Denise Arredondo to stand trial on felony charges stemming from the fatal shooting of 47-year-old Carlos Villa in the Home Gardens area, though the two defendants now face very different paths through the court system after a preliminary hearing split the case between them.
Villa was gunned down just before 1 a.m. on May 19 outside a home in the 3000 block of Grant Street, near Indiana Avenue, according to mynewsla.com. Seed reporting from MyNewsLA.com places the attack after 11 p.m. on May 18 in that same stretch of road, which sits between Home Gardens and Corona. Patrol deputies responded to reports of an unresponsive man and found Villa suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, Riverside County Sheriff's Sergeant Alberto Loureiro said, according to the outlet's reporting. “Life-saving measures were attempted, but paramedics ultimately pronounced the man deceased at the scene,” Loureiro said.
A Monthlong Hunt for Suspects
In the days after the shooting, investigators had no one in custody and were still working to identify a suspect, according to the station's report. Central Homicide Unit detectives took over the case from patrol and spent weeks developing leads, work that eventually pointed toward Saldaña and Arredondo as the alleged perpetrators, per the same account.
Nearly a month after Villa was killed, those leads led to arrests. Saldaña and Arredondo, both Corona residents, were taken into custody in June, arrested without incident at separate locations in mid-June, according to the seed reporting. Both were booked into Riverside County Jail on murder charges.
Charges Diverge at Preliminary Hearing
Prosecutors initially pursued murder charges against both defendants, along with special-circumstance allegations of lying in wait and killing for the benefit of a criminal street gang, as reported by Patch. But the case took a sharp turn at the preliminary hearing. Judge Jerry Yang ruled that sufficient evidence supported sending Saldaña to trial on first-degree murder, the lying-in-wait and criminal-street-gang special circumstances, and gun and great-bodily-injury enhancements, according to the seed reporting.
For Arredondo, Yang reached a different conclusion. The judge dismissed the murder charge against her and found insufficient evidence to try her on the special-circumstance allegations, per the same reporting. Instead, Yang found grounds for her to face charges of assault resulting in great bodily injury and criminal street gang activity.
Bail, Custody and What Comes Next
The custody outcomes also diverged. Arredondo had a no-bail hold lifted and was ordered held in lieu of $50,000 bail at Smith Correctional Facility, according to the seed reporting. Saldaña remains held without bail, with the seed facts placing him at Byrd Detention Center — though Gold Rush Cam reported that both defendants were arrested in Corona on June 12 and booked into Riverside County Jail on murder charges.
The court has set the pair's post-preliminary hearing arraignment for November 5 at the Riverside Hall of Justice, according to the seed reporting. A possible motive for the killing has not been disclosed in available reporting.
