A man is dead in a car trunk in Chino Hills. The driver put him there. Then he executed him — seconds before deputies dropped him where he stood.
At least two people are dead after sheriff's deputies opened fire in a quiet Chino Hills neighborhood following the discovery of a body inside the trunk of a car. https://t.co/WhDchc2hw3 pic.twitter.com/lXMr3g455m
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) July 30, 2026
Here’s how it happened.
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Late Wednesday night, around 10:14 p.m., San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies were called to a Monteverde Drive address. A man had been shot there and, according to investigators, kidnapped — loaded into the trunk of a gray Nissan Altima with Oregon plates.
Deputies located the car. The driver didn’t stop. A short pursuit followed, ending about a mile and a half away, near Gemstone Court and Wandering Ridge Drive.
Surveillance video from the scene shows the car coming to a stop as deputies close in. A passenger gets out first, hands raised, fully compliant. Then the driver gets out. He doesn’t put his hands up. He walks to the back of the car, opens the trunk, and fires a shot inside.
Deputies didn’t know there was a person in that trunk until that moment. They opened fire on the driver. He was struck and died at the scene.
The victim inside the trunk did not survive.
Read that sequence again. Deputies are working a pursuit stop, watching two occupants, doing exactly what training says to do — get compliance, secure the scene. Then one of the men they’re detaining turns and executes someone hidden in the car they never knew was occupied by a third person. There was no time to intervene before that shot was fired. There was time to respond after.
That’s the entire case for deadly force in one sentence. A man armed and actively killing someone, in front of deputies, is not a threat you wait out. He created the emergency. Deputies ended it.
The passenger is in custody, cooperating. San Bernardino County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Gloria Orejel says there’s no outstanding threat to the public and no other suspects being sought. Homicide detectives are now working two crime scenes a mile and a half apart, trying to piece together who the victim was, why he was targeted, and what connection — if any — ties him to the two people in that car.
None of that is public yet. What’s public is enough: a kidnapping, an execution in a trunk with deputies standing feet away, and a driver who didn’t survive making that decision.
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The new book from Ray Dietrich. Five shootings in five months in Riverside County. The full book is coming - read how it starts, free.
