Baby Emmanuel Haro, the alleged murder victim in a case where his parents Jake and Rebecca Haro are the defendants, would still be alive today if not for a judge’s decision to grant Jake probation in a different child abuse case two years ago, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin asserted on Wednesday.
In 2023, Jake pleaded guilty to willful child cruelty in a case involving his 10-week-old daughter, Carolina Haro, who suffered a fractured skull, damaged spine, multiple broken bones, and other injuries evidencing severe child abuse.
At a court hearing on June 8, 2023, Superior Court Judge Dwight W. Moore suspended Jake Haro’s 6-year prison sentence and granted probation instead.
“I’m giving you a chance,” said Judge Moore. “Don’t mess it up. Good luck.”
It appeared from his comments at the time that Moore thought the threat of prison for any probation violations would be a deterrent for any further wrongdoing.
“We have hung a very large hammer over the defendant’s head,” he said, according to a transcript obtained by the Long Beach Post.
The judge’s decision “was absolutely outrageous,” Hestrin said at a Wednesday press conference. “Mr. Haro should have been in prison. … If that judge had done his job as he should have done, Emmanuel would be alive today.”
At the 2023 hearing, Deputy District Attorney Sam Taloa took issue with the lenient sentence.
“Your Honor, I would just ask for the record to reflect that the People are objecting to this,” said Taloa. “This is based on the severity of the injuries, as we discussed, to the victim.”
On Wednesday, Judge Moore told the Long Beach Post that ethical rules prevent him from explaining why he granted probation to Jake Haro.
“I’m absolutely precluded from commenting publicly about the case,” said Judge Moore, who acknowledged that the controversy caught him by surprise. “In 18 years, this is the first time I’ve been taken to task in this manner about a decision I’ve made.”
Judge Moore, who spent 26 years in the San Bernardino County DA’s office before being appointed to the bench in 2007 by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, retired from full-time service in 2021 but has continued to handle temporary judicial assignments.
The fate of 7-month-old Emmanuel Haro has drawn nationwide attention since his mother, Rebecca Haro, reported to police on Aug. 14 that an unknown man kidnapped her baby from the parking lot of a Big 5 store in Yucaipa while she was changing his diaper.
“I was going to get the diaper and somebody said, ‘Hola,’ and I don’t remember anything since,” Rebecca told a TV reporter from KTLA 5 the day after the purported kidnapping. “I woke up here on the floor and I didn’t see Emmanuel.”
At Wednesday’s press conference, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said that “within 24 hours through video surveillance, we found inconsistencies in Rebecca’s statement.”
On Tuesday, Jake and Rebecca Haro were arraigned in Riverside County Superior Court on charges that they murdered baby Emmanuel and on misdemeanor charges of filing a false police report.
DA Hestrin said authorities have evidence that Emmanuel was killed in Riverside County, which is why charges were filed there rather than in San Bernardino County, where Rebecca Haro reported her baby kidnapped.
“We believe Emmanuel was severely abused over a period of time,” said Hestrin.
Hestrin also said that Carolina Haro was left “permanently bedridden” by the willful child cruelty that her father, Jake Haro, committed and that Judge Moore made “an outrageous error in judgment” in granting him probation in 2023.
Meanwhile, outside the house in Cabazon where Jake and Rebecca Haro lived with baby Emmanuel, people have been posting signs, lighting candles, and demanding answers.
Cynthia Viruete, a resident of Hemet, where Jake Haro lived with a prior wife when newborn Carolina was battered, said the system failed baby Emmanuel.
“Because the dad has a history of abuse, he should not have been allowed to be around the baby,” said Viruete as she stood by a sign reading, “Where’s the baby?”
Although authorities believe Emmanuel Haro was murdered, “we don’t know exactly where the remains are,” said DA Hestrin on Wednesday.