About 90 minutes after masked gunmen opened fire on one another Thursday outside a Maryland apartment complex, killing a toddler and wounding his mother with stray bullets, Prince George’s County police received an intriguing phone call from a blocked number, according to a police affidavit filed in court.
But the caller, identified by police as Israel Fuentes Jr., 33, ended up in handcuffs himself, charged in the shooting death of 2-year-old Jeremy Poou-Caceres. The affidavit says that in filing a robbery report, Fuentes was trying to manufacture an explanation for why cellphone location data, which police routinely gather as evidence, might show that his phone was in the vicinity of the fatal gunfire.
“This false report created by Fuentes Jr. is evidence of consciousness of guilt due to his involvement in the murder,” police said in the affidavit, which was used to obtain arrest warrants. Fuentes and a second man, Johnny Turcios, 28, are being detained on charges including first-degree murder and weapons offenses. They were arrested late Thursday and early Friday, police said. Court records did not list attorneys for them.
The warrant lays out how the phone call from Fuentes — who police said possibly fired an assault rifle during the shooting — led to his arrest as well as Turcios’s. The burst of late-afternoon gunfire sent bystanders scrambling for cover and left residents of the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood fearful for their lives. Video seen by The Washington Post shows a woman screaming “They killed my son!” as first responders attempt to resuscitate him.
Prince George’s Assistant Police Chief Vernon Hale said at a news conference Friday that the investigation was continuing and that more shooters may be arrested. But detectives had gotten assistance “like no other” in the early hours from community members who shared photos and videos of the shooting and helped identify two of the four suspects who fled the apartment complex in a gold-colored Ford Explorer that had been stolen, Hale said.
“There’s at least two more suspects in that vehicle, and there’s some other individuals — whoever they were firing at — that we still need to talk to,” Hale said. “So we’re not done yet, and we won’t get any rest until we are.”
Police said that two groups shot at each other outside an apartment complex in the 1400 block of Kanawha Street around 5:30 p.m. Thursday, in what a witness described as a territorial dispute over drug dealing. Jeremy and his 17-year-old mother were “unintended targets,” police said.
“It was about 20 shots, I don’t know, more or less,” said Norma Beltran, a neighbor who said she briefly lived with Jeremy and his mother in 2023 and was devastated by the shooting. “We could hear the desperate screams of: ‘Help me! Help me! Help me!’”
According to the affidavit, Fuentes, Turcios and two other masked men were captured on surveillance video abandoning the Ford Explorer about a mile from the scene of the shooting. Officers found an AK-47-style rifle inside, the affidavit says.
Afterward, Fuentes went home and called police at 7:09 p.m., claiming his cellphone and money had been stolen by a group of armed men, according to the affidavit. With the cellphone number Fuentes provided, police obtained location data that led them to a Langley Park apartment on University Boulevard, just yards from the shooting scene.
Turcios was inside, along with a .22 caliber handgun, police said.
Fuentes’s story about a stolen cellphone was meant to distance him from the shooting, the affidavit says. Otherwise, “his historic cell phone location data would place him at the scene of the murder.” However, police were gathering surveillance photos, videos and witness accounts that implicated Fuentes in the shooting, including information from people who were in the apartment where Turcios was arrested, police said.
One witness “observed Turcios and Fuentes Jr. in an argument regarding drug distribution territory with a group of males positioned” close to Jeremy and his mother, according to the affidavit. The same witness is quoted as saying that “Turcios and Fuentes Jr. both displayed firearms and shot at the group, striking” both mother and son.
A second witness gave detectives a video of the shooting showing Fuentes firing what appeared to be an AK-47-style rifle while standing beside the Ford Explorer that he and others used as a getaway vehicle, according to the affidavit. A third witness to the shooting shared a photograph with police depicting Fuentes and another suspect, the affidavit says.
Court records show that Turcios was previously charged with assault, robbery and illegal use of a firearm in 2017, among other charges, and Fuentes had drug possession and theft charges from 2017 and 2019 in his criminal history. Attorneys who represented them in those cases did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It was unclear from online court records on Saturday how those cases were resolved.
Residents at the Langley Park apartment complex said they have been increasingly living in fear, describing frequent drug and gang activity and little commensurate activity by police. One resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of gang violence, said the complex’s management company, Jair Lynch, had hired private security guards to patrol eight hours a day and installed a security camera, but that stronger measures were needed. The man also said that the apartment building’s main doors do not lock, although individual residences have locking doors.
“We are saddened by this terrible incident and are cooperating fully with the Prince George’s County police, who we believe [have] been proactive and responsive to our concerns when needed at this property,” a spokesperson for Jair Lynch said. “We continuously evaluate opportunities to enhance and improve security measures. Since purchasing [the property] in May of 2022, our security measures have included on-site security guards, a police officer that lives at the property, enhanced lighting, and we are in the process of improving controlled access into each of the buildings.”
Police seemed to already have been investigating at least some of the suspects before the gunfire broke out Thursday, according to the affidavit. A Prince George’s police officer “was conducting surveillance” on the Ford Explorer “shortly before the shooting,” the affidavit says. Then, the officer “heard multiple gunshots and observed two suspects wearing masks fleeing the scene in the Ford Explorer.” The officer went to Jeremy and his mother and began to render aid, the warrant says.
“These are the cases we lose sleep over,” Hale said. “We’ll never forget these cases, because children are not supposed to die.”
Ian Shapira and Jasmine Hilton contributed to this report.
