On Sunday afternoon, November 26, 2017, ranch hands and deputies traced the smoke of a burning SUV off Burlington Trail Road to a reservoir on the Wyoming Hereford Ranch east of Cheyenne.
In the water they found a 19-year-old male, Justin R. Robinson, his body floating face down. The Laramie County coroner and sheriff's office fixed the manner of death as homicide, a single gunshot to the head; one report described the bullet's path as entering behind the right ear and exiting near the
left ear.
The 19-year-old male, identified in funeral records as Justin Randall Robinson, had been born at Fort Hood, Texas, and raised in Cheyenne, where he finished the Wyoming Cowboy Challenge program in 2016 and kept close to family and friends.
Obituaries remembered a young man who loved music, bonfires, fishing, and camping.
Within days, the investigation accelerated. A 17-year-old was arrested as an accessory before the act of arson and after the fact of first-degree murder, and deputies named a 21-year-old Cheyenne man, Armando Raul Ramirez-Serna, as the person they were seeking for questioning in the killing of Justin Randall Robinson. Investigators noted a burned vehicle, a scene with blood and a stolen. 40-caliber handgun, and asked the public to consider the armed suspect dangerous.
By the first week of December, officers arrested Ramirez-Serna in Kimball, Nebraska; he was the fourth person apprehended in connection with the death of 19-year-old Justin Randall Robinson, whose body had been found in the reservoir. Early charging waves also reached beyond Wyoming: a 19-year-old woman from Kimball, Nebraska, and a 21-year-old Cheyenne man were both booked on accessory allegations as the case widened.
State charges against Ramirez-Serna shifted during the winter, amended from first-degree to second-degree murder and property destruction, before the case moved to federal court in 2018.
There, he admitted in a plea agreement that he shot 19-year-old Justin Randall Robinson during a robbery, took marijuana and cash from the SUV, dumped the 19-year-old Robinson in the reservoir and set the vehicle ablaze.
Prosecutors later summarized the motive as paltry: less than four ounces of marijuana and just over $200.
In February 2019 a federal judge sentenced Ramirez-Serna, a male defendant, to 40 years in prison and ordered restitution.
The companion cases fractured. A judge dismissed the accessory-after-the-fact charge against the 21-year-old Cheyenne man for lack of probable cause, and a separate accessory charge against a 19-year-old Kimball woman was also thrown out.
The juvenile accused of helping burn the vehicle and dispose of the 19-year-old Justin Robinson's body moved through the courts on accessory allegations; subsequent public records do not clearly state the final outcome. Through these turns, investigators and prosecutors focused their homicide case on the shooter already in custody and, ultimately, in federal prison.
From a smoky November afternoon at a quiet reservoir to a federal courtroom, the arc of the case fixed a stark narrative: a 19-year-old male, shot in the head, robbed of a small stash and cash, discarded in the water, and a male suspect who admitted the killing and received a four-decade sentence.
