Heartbreaking news. A family of four, who were kidnapped at gunpoint from their trucking business in Central California’s Merced County Monday morning, was found dead Wednesday, authorities said. The bodies of the victims were discovered in a very remote farmland area.
“It’s horribly, horribly senseless,” Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said. The bodies of the victims were found in the same area, he said.
Deputies received a call from a farm worker around 5:30 p.m. who stumbled across the bodies in an orchard near Indiana and Hutchinson Roads.
When detectives arrived, the bodies were found near each other and confirmed to be 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri, her mother, 27-year-old Jasleen Kaur, her father, 36-year-old Jasdeep Singh, and her 39-year-old uncle, Amandeep Singh.
Sheriff Warnke says all the details will be released soon.
The suspect has been identified as 48-year old Jesus Salgado, who was apprehended on Tuesday.
Officers said he tried to commit suicide before his arrest. Salgado was then hospitalized and put in an induced coma but now is awake and talking.
According to Sheriff Warnke, they have a lot of evidence on hand against Salgado.
In a Wednesday morning news conference, prior to the discovery of the bodies, sheriff’s officials released surveillance footage which they said showed the victims being led out of the business by an armed man.
The video shows the man exiting the building with Jasdeep and Amandeep, who are both zip-tied at the hands, and placing them in the back of a pickup truck. The truck leaves, but returns six minutes later. The suspect goes back inside, and leaves soon after with Kaur and her daughter Aroohi Dheri.
There were two bank transactions from the family’s accounts, the sheriff said.
Officials said on Tuesday that detectives received information that one of the victim’s ATM cards was used at a bank in the city of Atwater, in Merced County. The sheriff’s office initially said a person captured in surveillance footage making a transaction at the bank matched the appearance of a suspect seen in surveillance footage at the kidnapping scene. The sheriff’s office later said a photo of the person at the ATM was not the person of interest who is in custody.
The FBI, California Department of Justice and local law enforcement agencies were involved in the search, the sheriff’s office said. Merced County is located between San Francisco and Fresno.
There was still no word on a motive in the kidnappings, or the possible connection between Salgado and the victims. Warnke said Salgado was convicted of robbery in 2005. Salgado was paroled in 2015 and has not had any major contact with law enforcement since, Warnke said.
The investigation was prompted when a pickup truck registered to Amandeep was found ablaze late Monday morning on a rural road in Winton, a community a few miles north of the city of Merced, the sheriff’s office said.
California Highway Patrol officers attempted to contact Amandeep, and when they were unable to do so, they reached a family member, who was also unable to contact Amandeep. Eventually, the family member reported all four missing.
By early Monday afternoon, sheriff’s investigators had determined that the four had been kidnapped from the business.
