Three 19-year-old men have been arrested in the death of a 36-year-old Placentia man who is believed to have been shot during an Anaheim “factory party.”
Johnathan Michael Rowe and Zachary Jay Goemaat, both of Santa Ana, and Larry Robert Douglass II of Artesia are being held on $1 million bail each in Orange County Jail, according to the Anaheim Police Department.
They are alleged to be responsible for the death of Julio Cesar Munoz, whose body was found just after midnight on Sept. 29, 2018, near a trash dumpster enclosure in a cul-de-sac in the 1200 block of North Sunshine Way. He’d been shot once in the head.
Detectives apparently determined that the shooting had occurred during a factory party or gathering in an industrial area. Factory parties, which rotate among spots in the region, allow guests to find plenty of parking and “participate in illicit activities, including the inhalation of nitrous oxide, also known as ‘nos,'” according to Anaheim PD homicide Sgt. Jeff Mundy.
Based on the tweets the department posted the same day the body was discovered, detectives were quickly on the factory party aspect to the case.
Detectives interviewed dozens of witnesses, reviewed video footage and filed about 20 search warrants before the suspects were identified and arrested without incident Wednesday and Thursday, Mundy says.
So far, the motive for the shooting has not been released.
The arrests cleared the last of seven 2018 homicides in Anaheim, Mundy says, and all the cases were cleared by arrests.
“We treat every murder investigation with the same sense of duty and urgency,” he says. “Our detectives doggedly work these cases until every lead is exhausted, regardless of how long it takes. We are happy to finally bring closure to Mr. Munoz’s family.”
It will be up to the Orange County District Attorney’s office to determine charges to be filed in the case.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.