O.C. Boy’s Body Found Cut Up in Concrete Blocks

Police on Sunday arrested seven people on suspicion of murdering a 12-year-old boy whose dismembered body was discovered over the weekend, hacked into more than half a dozen pieces and encased in crudely poured concrete blocks his killer or killers mixed themselves, police said Sunday.

Starting from a 200-pound concrete block, police followed a trail of blood and concrete to a house half a block away, where early Sunday morning they arrested all the people who lived in or were visiting the house.

The victim, Juan Delgado, who moved to La Habra with his family from Guadalajara, Mexico, six years ago, had been missing since Tuesday afternoon, when he failed to come home from school, Police Capt. John Rees said. Rees said the boy had been strangled before his body was dismembered.

Police dispatched a priest Sunday afternoon to the boy’s home, where his mother, Marguerita Delgado, sat crumpled in an armchair, tears running down her cheeks and onto her bare feet.

“I’m devastated, hearing the things that we’ve heard today,” she said in an interview earlier in the day. “When the police came, I fell to the ground. I cried, ‘No, tell me God. Please, Virgin Maria, tell me it’s not my son.’ ”

A search of the suspects’ house turned up cement mix, cutting implements and blood, police said. The suspects were questioned at length by detectives Sunday.

“Nobody knows nothing,” Rees said of the suspects. “A trail of evidence indicates somebody ought to know something, but at this point we are getting unsatisfactory answers.”

As Orange County sheriff’s deputies with bloodhounds searched door-to-door for ten blocks around the curbside where the first concrete block was found, police investigators struggled to understand the genesis of a crime Rees described as “devastating, tragic, bizarre.”

By late Sunday, about 80% of the boy’s body had been found, Rees said.

Police said they believe Juan’s killers strangled him in the shed behind the house on West Greenwood Avenue, where four of the suspects were tenants, encased his remains in several homemade concrete blocks, put them into a shopping cart and dumped them on neighbors’ lawns.

A shopping cart found by police at Highlander Avenue and Walnut Street was taken into evidence.

The first block was discovered about 2 p.m. Saturday afternoon, after a Willow Street resident, angry at what he thought was trash left on his lawn, kicked at the 200-pound block.

When he did, other neighbors who witnessed the find said, the block overturned, revealing blood and evidence of human tissue.

Police canvassing the area found a second, smaller concrete block containing other parts of the boy’s body in the 500 block of North Walnut Street about 6:30 p.m., Rees said. Using dental records and photos provided by the family, police identified the victim.

On Sunday, police found several other human bones they believe may be the victim’s, Rees said. Several of the bones, along with some pieces of clothing and traces of cement, were found in an alley in the 400 block of North Walnut Street, not far from the second block of concrete, Rees said.

Police also took into evidence a plastic cement mixing barrel they believe the killers dumped on a lawn at Highlander Avenue and Willow Street.

In custody are Maria Eugenia Astorias, 38, the owner of the West Greenwood Avenue house, and her son, Frederico Leonardo de Paz, 21, and daughter-in-law, Silvia Veronica Asturias de Paz, 20, along with four tenants who lived in a garage and another structure on the property. They are Martin Hernandez, 24, Guadalupe Lopez, 27, Oliver Martins Crispen, 30, and John Samual Ghobrial, 27.

“It’s hard to believe the way the situation has unfolded, that these people didn’t know what was going on,” Rees said, adding that police are convinced that more than one person was involved. “It would have been difficult for one person to lift up that chunk of concrete by himself.”

Police consider the suspects, all of whom are immigrants, flight risks. Investigators have 48 hours to come up with enough evidence for charges to be filed, or else the suspects must be released.

Several of the suspects probably will be released by Monday night or Tuesday morning for lack of evidence, Rees said.

Investigators have not ruled out the possibilities of a sex crime or cult, Rees said, a shocking idea in this quiet city of 55,000 that averages but two homicides a year.

On Sunday afternoon, neighbors began placing bunches of fresh flowers on the lawn where the first concrete block was discovered, despite the police tape that surrounded the home.

At the Delgado house, friends crowded in to comfort Marguerita Delgado, while a friend tried to call Delgado’s husband, a truck driver on a job in Massachusetts.

“She can’t believe that people would do this,” said Ligwa Arencibia, a family friend who was at the house Sunday. “She keeps repeating, ‘What could he have possibly done to these people to do such a horrible act?’ She feels that life has no meaning.”

Delgado said her son, a student at Washington Middle School, had left home several times before, for days at a time, so when he did not come home from school Tuesday, the family was not particularly worried.

“The mother apparently did not become alarmed until after the second day,” Rees said. The boy had indicated to police in the past that he usually stayed at a friend’s house for a night, he said.

But when Juan did not return on Thursday, Marguerita Delgado became frightened.

“We went to look for him. We checked his friends’ houses, we checked the playgrounds, we checked everywhere, and we couldn’t find him,” Delgado said. “That’s when I called the police.”

About 3 p.m. Sunday, two police officers gave Delgado the horrifying news.

In the warm night air of Sunday evening, three of Delgado’s five other children played outside with a plastic ball, apparently unaware of what had happened to their brother.

Times staff writers Davan Maharaj and Bonnie Hayes and Times correspondent Lisa Addison contributed to this story.

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Crime Scene

The body of 12-year-old Juan Delgado, dismembered and encased in crudely poured concrete blocks, was discovered over the weekend.