A Child Missing
Rebecca called authorities on August 14, saying that she’d been knocked unconscious in the parking lot of a sporting goods store while she was changing Emmanuel’s diaper in her pickup truck. She awoke on the ground, she later said, and didn’t see her baby anywhere.
Authorities with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office and Yucaipa Police Department launched an investigation, deploying scent-tracking dogs to the store and surrounding area. But the dogs couldn’t pick up a trail for Emmanuel, a 21-pound, brown-haired, brown-eyed boy.
A day after his disappearance, investigators said they still didn’t have any leads in the alleged kidnapping. Rebecca issued an impassioned plea to the kidnapper. “Please don’t hurt my son, please protect him,” she said during a Fox 11 interview. “Please come forward, I’m begging you.”
But soon, investigators began to find holes in Rebecca’s story.
Authorities Start to Suspect the Parents
Three days after Emmanuel disappeared, authorities confronted Rebecca with the inconsistencies they’d found. In response, they said she shut down the interview.
Searches in Yucaipa, where Emmanuel had allegedly been kidnapped, and nearby Cabazon, Calif., yielded no evidence in the case. Authorities also searched the Haros’ home several times.
Then, on August 22, one week after Emmanuel disappeared, authorities arrested Rebecca and Jake and charged them with murder. In an Instagram post, investigators said multiple interviews, searches and digital and electronic evidence led them to conclude a kidnapping “did not occur. It is believed Emmanuel is deceased and the search to recover his remains is ongoing.”
Jake Haro’s Past
At a press conference after their arrests, Hestrin said the case brought against the Haros “reflects our belief that baby Emmanuel was abused, a victim of child abuse over time, and eventually, because of that abuse, he succumbed to those injuries.”
Emmanuel likely died, prosecutors said, sometime between August 5 and 14.
Hestrin also revealed a piece of potential evidence: Jake had previously pleaded guilty to cruelty against another child from a previous marriage, an abuse so severe, Hestrin said, it left the young girl “permanently bedridden.” But the judge handed down a suspended sentence. “If that judge had done his job as he should have done, Emmanuel would be alive today,” Hestrin alleged.
On October 16, Jake pleaded guilty to Emmanuel’s murder as well as child endangerment and filing a false police report. It’s unclear what prompted him to change his not guilty plea.
1 Case Closed, Another Open
At his November sentencing hearing, prosecutors asked Riverside County Superior Court Judge Gary Polk to sentence Jake to 31 years in prison: Twenty-five years to life for killing Emmanuel and more than six years for assaulting his daughter years before (to enforce the sentence that had been suspended after Jake pleaded guilty in that case).
“Jake Haro murdered seven-month-old Emmanuel but, in reality, he comes before this court having taken the lives of two young children,” Brandon Smith, an assistant district attorney, wrote in court filings. “If there are lower forms of evil in this world, I am not aware of them.”
Emmanuel’s maternal grandmother, Mary Beushausen, also spoke at the hearing, asking the judge to hand down a harsh sentence. “He [Jake] didn’t give me the opportunity to meet my grandson,” she said. “He destroyed my whole family.”
Beushausen added that her daughter, Rebecca, “was never the same person after she went to live with" Jake: "If I had known what was going on, I would have taken her out of there.”
Rebecca is scheduled to appear in court in January. Despite Jake joining investigators on a search for his son’s remains, Emmanuel’s body has not yet been found.
