Neighbor who heard shots, saw silhouette testifies in murder case
“I didn’t see him shoot anyone,” a witness testified Friday morning in the capital murder trial for Preston Strong, who has been charged in the 2005 La Mesa Street murders, in which two adults and four children were killed.
Neighbor Kieth Hansen testified during direct examination by prosecutor Karolyn Kaczorowski of the Yuma County Attorney’s Office that the evening of the murders he was barbecuing on the back porch and his wife was swimming in their pool when they heard several gunshots.
Hansen said he walked over to his side fence and looked in the direction he thought the shots had come from and saw someone standing in the backyard of a home two houses away.
“I couldn’t see his face,” Hansen said. “I just saw a silhouette of a person from the side.”
Upon hearing the gunshots, Hansen said his wife said they needed to go inside their home, and that is what they did, not coming back out until police arrived later.
“I thought I heard three to four shots, but it could have been more,” Hansen said
After refreshing his memory by reading a police report containing a statement he gave officers later that same evening, Hansen testified that he thought the person was tall, possibly about 5 feet 9 inches and wore a blue shirt.
When asked by Kaczorowski if he had spoken with officers on July 6 of that year, and if they had shown him a composite drawing of the suspect, which was based on information provided by another witness, Hansen said that he had.
Hansen testified that
what he told the officers was the person he saw that night standing in the backyard of the home where the murders happened had more hair then the suspect in the drawing.
“It looked like he had short, curly, nappy hair,” Hansen said. “It was probably about an inch to an inch and a half.”
However, under cross examination by one of Strong’s attorneys, Bill Fox of the Yuma County Public Defender’s Office, Hansen testified that he could not tell if the person he had seen was either Black or Hispanic.
“I thought he was a dark-complected person,” Hansen said. “I only saw him for a few seconds.”
Jerry Gomes, who owned a pool cleaning business and serviced the pool at the house the day of the murders, was also called to the stand and testified that he didn’t see anyone at the house while he was there.
Gomes said he got to the house at about 11:55 a.m. and spent about 30 minutes cleaning the pool, eventually leaving at 12:24 p.m.
“The kids never came out,” Gomes testified when asked by Kaczorowski if anything strange had happened while he was there.
Gomes also testified that it wasn’t until he got to his next customer, who lived about a mile and a half away, that he realized he had left his chemical tester at the La Mesa street home and had to go back and get it.
Once he got there, Gomes testified that he parked in front of the house and his wife, who was with him that day, went into the backyard to retrieve it, but it was not there.
His wife, he said, then went and knocked on the front door to ask for it, and when she did, one of the two boys handed it to her.
Jurors also heard testimony from two former Yuma police officers, Tammy Calendar and Greg Counts, about their roles in the investigation of the murders. The trial resumes on Monday.
Strong, who is represented by attorneys Fox and Raymond Hanna of Prescott, is charged with six counts of first-degree murder, one count of armed robbery and one count of burglary in the La Mesa Street murders, which occurred on June 24, 2005.
He is also currently serving two life-term sentences with no chance for parole for the 2007 murder of Yuma physician Satinder Gill.
On June 24, 2005, at about 8:25 p.m., Yuma police were dispatched to 2037 E. La Mesa Street after several people called 911 to report that shots had been fired and a person was yelling for help.
Upon arrival, officers found a man later identified as Rios in the backyard with multiple gunshot wounds.
Inside, police found the bodies of Adrienne Heredia and her four children — 13-year-old Andreas Crawford and 12-year-old Enrique Bedoya, 9-year-old Inez Newman and 6-yearold Danny Heredia. Some of the victims had been bound and strangled, and some had been shot.