Trial begins for San Pedro man accused in case of missing student

SALINAS >> The San Pedro man last seen with Kristin Smart, the college freshman who vanished from a California campus 25 years ago, is on trial more than a year after he was arrested on a murder charge along with his father, who is accused of helping hide her body.

Opening statements began Monday in Monterey County Superior Court in Salinas in the case against Paul Flores and his father, Ruben Flores, who is charged as an accessory. Both men have pleaded not guilty.

Paul Flores, now 45, was arrested in April 2021 at his home in San Pedro, nearly a quarter-century after Smart disappeared after being seen with Flores as he walked her home from an off-campus party where she reportedly got intoxicated. Officials declared Smart dead in 2002, but her remains still have not been located. The mystery of how she vanished from the scenic campus tucked against a verdant coastal mountain range is likely to be central to the trial.

Deputy District Attorney Christopher Peuvrelle described how Smart disappeared from California Polytechnic State University over Memorial Day weekend in 1996, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported.

“In 1995, Stan and Denise Smart sent their oldest daughter Kristin to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo,” Peuvrelle said in his opening remarks. “During her freshman year they looked forward every Sunday to a phone call from her — it was their ritual.”

That weekend, the call never came, Peuvrelle said.

Prosecutors maintain the younger Flores killed the 19-year-old during an attempted rape on May 25, 1996, in his dorm room at Cal Poly, where both were first-year students. His father, now 81, allegedly helped bury the slain student behind his home in the nearby community of Arroyo Grande and later dug up the remains and moved them.

Paul Flores had long been considered a suspect in the killing, but prosecutors only arrested him and his father in 2021 after the investigation was revived.

San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson acknowledged missteps by detectives over the years, and he credited a popular podcast about Smart’s disappearance called “Your Own Backyard” for helping unearth new information and inspiring witnesses to speak with investigators.

Investigators have conducted dozens of searches over two decades but turned their attention in the past two years to Ruben Flores’ home about 12 miles south of Cal Poly in the community of Arroyo Grande.

Behind lattice work beneath the deck of his large house on a dead end street off Tally Ho Road, archaeologists working for police in March 2021 found a soil disturbance about the size of a casket and the presence of human blood, prosecutors said. The blood was too degraded to extract a DNA sample.

San Luis Obispo Superior Court Judge Craig Van Rooyen ordered the pair to trial after a 22-day preliminary hearing in which he found a “strong suspicion” the father and son committed the crimes they were charged with, that a grave existed under Ruben Flores’ deck and it once held Smart’s remains.

Attorney Harold Mesick, who represents Ruben Flores, previously said the evidence unearthed was ambiguous. He said that soil under the deck had been dumped there after being excavated to lay a foundation nearby.

“It was a hot mess because it’s been previously excavated,” Mesick said. “If we even call it evidence, it is so minimal as to shock the conscience.”

Paul Flores was the last person seen with Smart on May 25, 1996.