Friends and family reported two Black men missing on April 14 outside of Oklahoma City and three white men have been arrested in connection with their murder.
21-year-old Alize Ramon Smith and Jarron Moreland’s bodies were found dismembered in a pond by Moore County officers on April 18. Police then arrested four people on the same day: 22-year-old Kevin Garcia-Boettler and his 16-year-old brother who is the suspected shooter, 43-year-old Johnny Shane Barker and the Boettler boys’ mother Crystal Rachelle Boettler, 40, who’s been charged with accessory to crime, after tracing Kevin’s phone back to the location of the killings, according to WJLA.
Smith and Moreland reportedly met with Garcia-Boettler and his 16-year-old brother to purchase a gun from the victims from a sale organized through Craiglist. Both parties agreed to meet a nearby grocery store. Garcia-Boettler told police Moreland stepped into the back of his van and the younger brother then opened fire on both victims, the court records state.
“When [Moreland and Smith] entered the vehicle, the white men said they heard a gun being racked… So one of them fired four rounds,” Sgt. Jeremy Lewis of the Moore Police Department recalled.
Garcia-Boettler also revealed to authorities that he and his little brother met up with Barker, their mother’s boyfriend, to discard the victim’s bodies and clean their van. The three white men then removed and burned Moreland and Smith’s clothes, dismembered their bodies, tied them to cinder blocks and dumped them in a pond.
“We’re just glad that we get some closure and we found him… We needed this,” Moreland’s uncle, Anthony Anderson told KFOR News while the victim’s grandmother stood by sobbing.
Twitter influencer and journalist Shaun King tweeted, “This literally appears to be a modern day lynching.”
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/989528605733675009
The 16-year-old was charged with first-degree murder, second-degree murder, unlawful removal of a dead body, desecration of a human corpse and possessing a firearm after delinquent adjudication. Garcia-Boettler is charged with accessory after the fact and unlawful removal of a dead body. Barker is charged with accessory after the fact, unlawful removal of a body and desecration of a human corpse, according to court documents.