A man was found guilty of first-degree murder on Wednesday. He killed a Morena Valley girl, 16, because she got him kicked out of school. After that, he hid her body in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Owen Skyler Shover, 23, of Hesperia was found guilty by a jury in Riverside after just over a day of deliberations. The jurors also found that Shover was guilty of lying in wait for Aranda Briones’ death in 2019.
Shover is being held at the Byrd Detention Center in Murrieta without bail. He is facing a mandatory term of life in prison without the chance of parole.
His brother, Gary Anthony Shover, 27, of Hesperia, admitted to being an accomplice after the fact as part of a plea deal with the DA’s office in March. He was given criminal probation for one year.
The trial brief from District Attorney Mike Hestrin says that Aranda and Shover went to Moreno Valley High School in the fall of 2017.
Histrin said that Aranda chose not to go to class on the morning of November 7, 2017, but instead went to Community Park with her friends, which included Shover. The teens were in the park when a sheriff’s school security officer looking for truants saw them and went to talk to them. This made the teens run away in different directions. The court papers say that Shover had a small-caliber handgun and threw it at Aranda while yelling for her to hide it.
When the victim got scared, it threw itself into a drainage ditch right away. But the deputy caught her in the act and later held and questioned her along with school officials. That’s when she told them that Shover was the one with the gun, Hestrin said.
In February 2018, the local school board heard about the problem and decided to kick Aranda and Shover out of school. She started going to a close continuation school, while Shover moved out of his mother’s house in Moreno Valley and into his dad’s house in Hesperia, where he started going to a continuation school. But he was furious about being kicked out and what he saw as Aranda’s betrayal.
Detectives from the Sheriff’s Central Homicide Unit later found chats the defendant started on Snapchat, Facebook, and other sites from November 2018 to January 2019 in which he tried to buy a gun, the brief said. In the end, he got one.
The brief said that Shover texted Aranda on January 12, 2019, and asked her to join him the next day while he delivered drugs and “robbed drug dealers.” They decided to meet at Bayside Park, and they did so just before 5 p.m. on January 13, 2019. Hestrin said that Aranda got into the defendant’s Nissan Versa with two of her friends watching. The two of them then drove north toward Box Springs Mountain.
In less than an hour, she shared several photos on social media of herself and Shover in his car, saying how happy she was to be with her “homie,” who was letting her drive some of the time.
Mobile phone tower “pings,” Moreno Valley’s Citywide Camera System, and security cameras outside of houses in the area were used to follow the Nissan’s passengers around Box Springs Mountain for about 20 minutes. Court papers said the car went north toward San Bernardino around 6 p.m. and then turned left toward a mobile home park.
Shover called his brother on Facebook while he was on the way and said, “Get ready for tonight.” The brief says, “Get shovels and lighter fluid ready.”
The defendant picked up Gary Shover from the park, and he and Shover went north through the San Bernardino Mountains on state Routes 138 and 18. The suspect turned off his cell phone between 8:33 p.m. and 10:14 p.m., so the signal could not be read. Prosecutors say it started up again when he got to his dad’s house at 16210 Grevillea St.
In the weeks that followed, Aranda’s family and friends called the sheriff’s office because they thought she had been killed. The investigation started out as a search for a missing person, but Hestrin wrote that it “became a homicide investigation (because detectives found extensive and compelling evidence that the defendant carefully planned and carried out the murder of Aranda.”
As an important part of the investigation, the Nissan was searched and a blood detector called Luminol was sprayed in the trunk. This showed “the possible presence of a significant amount of blood that had pooled toward the bottom of the trunk, underneath the carpeting,” the report said.
Someone got DNA from the car, and he said that it turned out to be a match for Aranda.
Police and community groups have looked in the mountains where they think Aranda’s body may have been dumped, but they have never found any sign of her.
A sentencing hearing has been set for Oct. 25 at the Riverside Hall of Justice by Judge Timothy Hollenhorst of the Riverside County Superior Court.