Four charged in 2020 robbery turned slaying
Special agent called shooting a ‘crime of opportunity’
Andres Loera was found slumped in the driver’s seat of an SUV, a wad of money still in his hand, on Feb. 13, 2020. The 19-year-old had been shot four times with two separate guns, and a dozen shell casings littered the scene. Relatives told police Loera had gone to sell an ounce of marijuana to a girl he met on Facebook.
The 2nd Judicial District Attorney’s Office announced Friday it has charged that girl, Serina Burks, 18, along with Markell Barnes, 21, Rashawd Duhart, 25, and Ryan Baca, 25, in Loera’s death.
Kyle Hartsock, special agent in charge of the DA’s Special Investigations Bureau, called it a “crime of opportunity.”
“They hit up multiple people that night to try and set up a drug deal — to rob them. (Loera) was the one who agreed first,” he said.
The four suspects each face an open count of murder, armed robbery and conspiracy. They are also charged in the March 2020 armed robbery of a marijuana dispensary in Portland, Oregon. All four were pulled over in Sandoval County soon after, and found with the marijuana stolen from the dispensary and the guns used in Loera’s killing.
Barnes is jailed in Portland and Duhart is being extradited there. Baca — who was on probation in a 2014 homicide case — is in prison in Clayton, and Burks is at the Juvenile Detention Center in Albuquerque.
District Attorney Raúl Torrez said the case is part of a growing, often deadly, trend of robberies set up over social media.
“It involves a robbery in the course of a drug deal that ended this young person’s life,” Torrez said in a briefing Friday. “… That is overwhelmingly where our homicides start.”
For Elijah Mirabal, it was Instagram. For Clifford Patterson III and Adrian Martinez, it was Facebook Messenger. For Collin Romero and Ahmed Lateef, it was Snapchat.
After advisement from the DA’s Office, Albuquerque police are trying to crack down on that online drug market in the hopes of stopping the violence. Their first operation, in late January, resulted in four arrests and the seizure of two guns, 100 counterfeit oxycodone pills and five grams of methamphetamine.
APD interim Chief Harold Medina said Loera’s death was one of five homicides handed over to Hartsock’s bureau due to “a lack of resources” in APD’s homicide unit.
“It’s no longer about ‘who solved the case,’ it was about getting the case to somewhere where it could be investigated and the resources could be devoted
so we could carry on with the other cases we already had,” he said.
According to Journal records, 18 homicides from this year, 44 from 2020 and 37 from 2019 have not resulted in an arrest.
“The DA’s Office was able to get this over the finish line and make some arrests,” Medina said.
According to a criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court:
Police responded some time after 2:30 a.m. to the 1800 block of Hoffman NE, near Pennsylvania and Indian School, after neighbors reported gunfire, and found Loera dead in a sport utility vehicle. Video from a nearby home showed a white car pull up, and two people get out and open fire on Loera before fleeing.
The Albuquerque police homicide detective requested a warrant on Loera’s Facebook account, which was returned in April, and that concluded their involvement. In October, the DA’s Office took over the case and looked at the warrant, finding a conversation between Burks — who was 16 at the time — and Loera about buying marijuana in the hours leading up to his death.
Agents found a March 3 incident in which Jemez Police pulled over Burks, Baca, Duhart and Barnes for speeding, and found four guns and several pounds of marijuana — much of it stolen from a Portland dispensary — in the vehicle. Two of the guns — a rifle and a pistol — matched the casings found at the scene of Loera’s killing and also matched a drive-by shooting where an Albuquerque schoolteacher’s home was shot up five days after the homicide.
Barnes’s girlfriend told agents he had borrowed her car — which matched the one seen in the video — the night of the homicide and, on Valentine’s Day, had given her a box of sweets and “exactly” one ounce of marijuana. Agents requested several more warrants on the Facebook profiles of the suspects and found messages that detail Burks asking multiple people to sell her marijuana.
Eventually, after multiple other prospects fell through, including one where Burks didn’t want to travel to the West Side to meet the dealer, Loera agreed to meet Burks.
A month after the killing, a friend of Loera messaged Burks asking why they had to kill him. Burks denied the shooting, but wrote, “I’m sorry your boy had to get got” with the 100% emoji.
Hartsock traveled to Portland on Feb. 22 to meet with Barnes, who was in custody for the robbery of a marijuana dispensary there, and he initially denied being involved in Loera’s death. Barnes then told Hartsock that he picked up Burks, Baca and Duhart in his girlfriend’s vehicle the night of the killing.
He told Hartsock he didn’t know it was a robbery until Baca and Duhart got out of the car and started shooting. Barnes wrote to Loera’s family, apologizing for their son’s death. During interviews with Hartsock, Burks, Baca and Duhart all denied involvement in the crime.