On a hot summer evening in Yuma, Arizona, a house on East La Mesa Street became the scene of a horrific crime that claimed six lives, including that of 9-year-old Inez Newman. The date was June 24, 2005, a Friday that ended in unimaginable violence. Inez, a young girl, was found in her home, not with injuries from an accident, but as a victim of deliberate, calculated violence. She had been asphyxiated.
The tragedy unfolded over several hours.
That evening, police responded to reports of gunshots and screams at the residence. When they arrived, they discovered a scene of mass murder. In the backyard, they found 35-year-old Luis Rios, who had been shot multiple times and died shortly after at a local hospital. Inside the home, the horror continued. Officers found Inez’s mother, 29-year-old Adrienne Heredia, and three other children: Inez’s 6-year-old half-brother, Danny Heredia III, and two friends, 13-year-old Andreas Crawford and 12-year-old Enrique Bedoya. Like her mother and the two older boys, Inez had been suffocated. Her little brother, Danny, and Luis Rios had both been shot.
The investigation into the six murders was extensive, involving over 1,300 interviews and thousands of tips from a shocked community. For more than two years, the case remained without a public suspect. The break came on November 28, 2007, when authorities named Preston Alton Strong as the man they believed was responsible. At the time, Strong was already in custody on unrelated fraud charges. The motive, prosecutors would later argue, was money. Strong, a man described as a "career con man," had been a close friend of Luis Rios and frequently borrowed money from him. The friendship soured when Rios refused to keep funding Strong, leading to an argument about a month before the killings.
Preston Alton Strong was a serial killer whose violent acts extended beyond the La Mesa Street home. While awaiting trial for the six murders, he was prosecuted and convicted for the November 2007 murder of Dr. Satinder Gill, a 62-year-old physician found suffocated and bludgeoned in his home, which had been staged to look like an accident. Strong was sentenced to life in prison for that crime in 2012. It wasn't until 2014, nine years after Inez and her family were killed, that Strong was formally indicted for the six counts of first-degree murder from the 2005 massacre.
The trial for the La Mesa Street murders was long and arduous. Prosecutors presented evidence that included Strong's fingerprints on plastic bags found near the victims and his DNA on the steering wheel of Rios's abandoned car. They detailed how Strong spent hours inside the house, killing his victims one by one. On April 25, 2017, a jury found Preston Strong guilty on all six counts of first-degree murder. He was subsequently sentenced to death.
The legal battle did not end there. Strong appealed his convictions and death sentence, alleging juror misconduct and other trial errors. However, the appeals were rejected. In September 2024, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed his convictions and death sentences, bringing a measure of legal finality to a case that had haunted the Yuma community for nearly two decades.
For the surviving family members, the years were filled with pain and a desperate search for answers. In 2006, relatives of Adrienne Heredia appeared on "The Montel Williams Show," hoping a psychic medium might offer some clarity in their overwhelming grief. The brutal murder of Inez, her mother, her brother, and their friends left a permanent scar on their loved ones and the community. Preston Alton Strong remains on death row in Arizona, convicted of seven murders in total, a grim testament to the trail of lives he destroyed.
