Victims of Visalia triple homicide identified; no suspect or motive disclosed
Late Tuesday night, police officers in Visalia, a San Joaquin Valley city about 40 miles southeast of Fresno, responded to a report of shots fired at a high school.
In the parking lot, they found the bodies of three young men: Isaiah Rule, 18, Blake Medeiros, 19, and Jose Carlos Hernandez Pena, 19. All three had been shot to death, Sgt. Celestina Sanchez of the Visalia Police Department said.
As of Wednesday, detectives have made no arrests and identified no suspects. “It’s too early for us to speculate or guess as to the motive,” Sanchez said.
Rule, Medeiros and Hernandez Pena were not students at the school where they died, Sanchez said, and the school, Golden West High School, was closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Sanchez did not know whether the three teenagers had attended the school in the past.
In Visalia, a city of about 133,000 surrounded by vast groves of olive and citrus, a triple homicide is “unheard of,” Sanchez said. “Nobody around here can remember a time when something like this happened.”
Anyone with information about the killings is asked to contact Visalia police at (559) 713-4738.
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