Baby Emmanuel Haro: Death and Deception in the Desert
It looks like this missing baby was never missing at all.
We rarely use this platform to discuss local news, but this week, our home county of San Bernardino is caught up in a deviant, distressing, and devastating story of alleged murder, as a missing-child case that made national news has taken a gruesome turn.
Seven-month-old baby Emmanuel Haro, reported missing on August 14, is now thought to be deceased and discarded at the hands of his parents, Jake and Rebecca Haro.
San Bernardino County is the largest county by geographic size in the contiguous United States. In fact, it's bigger than nine US states, including West Virginia and Maryland.
And it's full of wide-open desert, craggy mountains, rocky outcroppings, fields of boulders, jagged canyons, and solitary playas where fossils readily sit, undisturbed. Sometimes it feels like you could take a hike almost anywhere, and if you fell, not a soul would hear you scream.
In other words, I'm sorry to say that beautiful San Bernardino County, and its neighbor, Riverside County, are full of great places to hide a body.
Especially a tiny one.
It is for that reason that San Bernardino County is this week cooperating with Riverside County to determine the resting place, such as it may be, of adorable little Emmanuel Haro.
The public update on the search comes after nearly two weeks of deception by his "parents," which seems too kind, too loving a word to use for the people who should have protected him, but are instead alleged to have killed him—possibly as early as August 5—and filed a false kidnapping report to cover it up. They were arrested on Friday, August 22, and today, Emmanuel's mother and father were formally charged with murder.
The public learned of the case on August 14, when Rebecca Haro, 41, of Cabazon, Riverside County, drove to a Big 5 Sporting Goods store in Yucaipa, San Bernardino County. Her husband, Jake Haro, 32, stayed at a nearby park with their other two children while one child attended football practice. Rebecca claimed she pulled into the parking lot at Big 5 to change the baby's diaper before purchasing a mouth guard for her son at football practice when someone knocked her out—leaving her with a black eye—and stole the baby.
“I was going to get the diaper and somebody said, ‘Hola,’ and I don’t remember anything since,” Rebecca claimed, crying, with her face bruised around her eye. “I woke up here on the floor and I didn’t see Emmanuel.”
Search parties were deployed immediately. But as locals fumed that no Amber Alert was issued for little Emmanuel—due, as San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus explained, to the not-yet-public, but already apparent inconsistencies in the case—the two counties were busy working together, noting telling inconsistencies in Rebecca's story.
Investigators also noticed that Jake Haro has a felony conviction for child cruelty, stemming from horrific injuries in 2018 to his daughter by a previous marriage, Carolina, then just ten weeks old.
Viewers of today’s press conference learned from Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin that this little girl presented at an ER with an "acute" fractured rib, six ribs with “healing” fractures, a skull fracture, brain hemorrhage, swelling of the neck, and a fractured leg bone that was “healing"—injuries the doctors immediately recognized as the result of serious abuse.
Carolina is alive today, but has been rendered permanently bedridden as a result of years of abuse, Hestrin attested, saying, "We believed it was a prison case and that Jake Haro should have gone to prison.” But shockingly, Hestrin explained, Jake Haro received only a suspended sentence and two years' probation for the crimes that caused the girl's injuries after he entered a guilty plea to a single count of child cruelty.
This time, however, while in jail, NewsNation reports that Jake Haro actually confessed to a fellow "inmate”—who turned out to be a Perkins informant—that he had killed the child and disposed of his body in a trash can.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco remarked in a press conference today, "There is nothing more important to us than the death of a human, particularly a child."
It's been deeply upsetting to watch search parties comb through our hills and canyons, helicopters overhead, K9 units deployed, and everyone clad in highlighter yellow or orange, because it really is so easy not to be seen in the brutal and unforgiving desert landscape.
Riverside County DA Hestrin does say that though authorities don't know where Emmanuel Haro's remains are, they have a "pretty strong indication” of where to look. But my God: this land.
There are rocks and gorges with deep crevices everywhere. There are wide washes littered with debris, meant to carry away floodwaters from rain the parched sand can't absorb quickly enough. There are old mine shafts hundreds of feet deep. There are deep stands of greasewood and juniper. The sand itself looks flat, but it undulates in little hills: A grown adult may pass in and out of view walking a straight line.
Hikers die here. Unhoused people die here. Dead people turn up in abandoned vehicles long after the fact. People go on walks and don't come back—like in this case, where remains were found less than a mile from Dave's and my former home.
And then there are the animals. This summer alone, bears, cougars, and bobcats have been sighted near our home—not to mention the ever-present coyotes.
If you think the frontier closed in 1890, you must not have been out here before. It's still the Wild West.
Can Riverside County and San Bernardino County combine enough resources to find one tiny little baby who might be anywhere in a combined area larger than West Virginia and Delaware put together—without the help of parents who still insist on their innocence?
Let's hope so.