S.D. Man, Youth Charged With Slaying of Couple at Rest Stop

A San Diego man and a teen-ager have been charged with shooting a young couple to death at a highway rest stop last year, officials said Monday.

Gregory Scott Dickens, 26, and a 16-year-old boy have been charged with two counts each of first-degree murder and armed robbery, Yuma County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Skip Carroll said.

Authorities withheld the boy’s name because he is a minor.

The two were wanted in the fatal shooting Sept. 10 of Bryan and Laura Bernstein at Telegraph Pass, a rest stop about 20 miles east of Yuma on Interstate 8.

The Bernsteins, both 22, had graduated from Cornell University and then attended one year of graduate school at Auburn University in Alabama. They were on their way to UCLA when they were killed.

Both were shot in the head. Mrs. Bernstein was pronounced dead at the scene, and her husband was taken to Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, where he died the next day.

A man tried unsuccessfully to use one of the Bernsteins’ credit cards the day after the shootings, police later learned.

Lt. Paul Ybarrondo of the San Diego Police Department said Dickens and the boy were wanted in the double homicide when detectives came across Dickens while investigating an unrelated sexual assault case. Dickens has been charged with unlawful sexual conduct in that case.

He didn’t know when extradition proceedings would take place.