She Was Only 18: Sheriff Nearly Committed SUICIDE After What He Witnessed

Rita, as a mother, how do you you get involved in this? >> Did you give anything for your son and his family? >> Did you give anything for his family? >> Did you give anything for your son to use in this murder? >> Why did you do it? >> There was a lot of information on social media that there was a third individual involved.

Our homicide detectives were aware of that. However, we were looking for enough probable cause to make that arrest and to present the best case forward to the DA’s office. Today, that happened. They were able to develop enough evidence to charge 47-year-old Marta Romanos. >> For 4 days, nobody knew where to look. On the north side of San Antonio, backed into the far corner of an apartment complex parking lot, a silver Kia sat completely untouched.

Windows up, doors locked. To anyone walking past, it was just another car in just another lot in a city of over a million people. Except this car hadn’t moved since before Christmas. And the two people inside it had missed the biggest celebration their family had planned all year without a single phone call to explain why.

When someone finally looked closely enough through the glass, one search ended and a much darker one began. Two young people who’d vanished 4 days earlier on the eve of becoming parents for the very first time were still sitting exactly where they’d been left in a car that had never gone anywhere at all. There was no sign of forced entry, nothing broken, nothing torn.

[music] And whoever had been with them in that car in their final moments hadn’t just walked away. They’d stayed long enough to make sure the car wouldn’t be found quickly and to make sure that whatever they were carrying when they got in it wouldn’t be found at all. Investigators would eventually trace the car’s last movements to a few minutes of parking lot surveillance footage.

A second vehicle pulling in after midnight. A man stepping out to wipe the Kia down by hand, and then both vehicles disappearing together into the one corner of the lot no camera could reach. Three and a half minutes later, only one of them drove back out. What happened in those three and a half minutes is where this story really starts.

But to understand how two people with everything ahead of them ended up parked in that corner forever, we have to go back to the last ordinary night anyone saw them alive. And the morning they were supposed to become a family of three. This is the story of Savanna Soto and Matthew Guerra. And the son who never got the chance to meet either of them.

Before we get into it, I’d love to know where you’re watching from and what time it is right now for you. Drop it in the comments. I read every one. And if true crime documentaries like this are your thing, go ahead and subscribe because there’s a lot more of these coming. Okay, let’s rewind to the beginning. To understand how that car ended up in that parking lot, you have to go back further than that December night.

Back to two families in San Antonio who, as the holidays approached in 2023, thought they already knew how their Christmas was going to go. >> It’s a boy, sir. >> It’s a boy. >> Savanna Soto was 18. Matthew Guerra was 22. They’d been together for a while by then, long enough to move in together. Long enough to argue and make up and argue again the way young couples do.

And long enough for Savanna to be 9 months pregnant with their first child. A boy the two of them had already picked a name for. Fabian. The due date had already come and gone. Savanna was scheduled to be induced in the final days before Christmas, which meant that within a matter of days, two families that had already been through more heartbreak than most people see in a lifetime, were finally supposed to get some good news for once.

Instead, what came next would pull both families into a nightmare that took years to fully unravel. And it started with something as small and as easy to miss as an empty hospital waiting room. Everyone who knew Savannah Soto describes her almost the same way. Warm, generous to a fault. The kind of person who noticed when someone else was struggling and did something about it.

Even if it cost her something to help. Her family called her a beautiful heart long before any of this happened. And by every account, she had earned that description honestly. She was still a teenager herself when she found out she was pregnant. But by the accounts of the people who loved her, she did not approach motherhood with fear.

She approached it the way she seemed to approach most things, head on and already in love. Long before Fabian was born, his nursery was ready. His name was chosen. His mother had spent months imagining who he would become. But the Soto family’s excitement that December carried an undertone that outsiders would not have understood. 7 months earlier, in May of 2023, Savannah’s 15-year-old brother Ethan had been shot and killed.

>> He was a piece of my heart. But now that he’s gone, >> [snorts] >> more than a piece is gone. >> Lured out by the promise of meeting a girl in what investigators later called a deliberate ambush tied to a dispute over stolen drugs. The Soto family had already stood at one funeral for a child taken far too soon.

The idea of losing another one, of losing Savannah, or the grandson everyone had already fallen in love with before he was even born, was not a hypothetical fear for them. It was a wound that had not finished healing. Matthew Guerra, at 22, was the man Savannah had built this new chapter of her life around.

Their relationship, by every honest account, was not a fairy tale. The two of them had gone through a rough patch about a year earlier, serious enough that it left a mark on Matthew’s record. But the people closest to them insisted that whatever had happened between them had not defined who they became. Matthew’s own father would later put it simply, “It was not a perfect relationship, but it also was not what people assumed from the outside looking in.

” >> He definitely didn’t hang around the best crowd. >> Matthew’s father confirmed the assault charge involved Savannah and happened last Christmas. But since then, he says they’ve been a happy couple living together in Leon Valley. >> They were inseparable. Was it the perfect relationship? No, but but she definitely was not a prisoner there.

Her and Matthew were both overjoyed and couldn’t wait for their Fabian’s arrival. >> By December of 2023, friends and family described two people who were, in their own imperfect way, inseparable. And who were, by every appearance, genuinely counting down the days until they became a family of three. That countdown was almost over. The nursery was ready.

The bags were packed. And in a matter of days, Savannah was scheduled to walk into a hospital and walk out a mother. She never got the chance. Savannah never made it to that hospital appointment. Her phone rang and rang. So did Matthew’s. By the time anyone in either family understood that something was actually wrong, not just a missed call, not just two young people losing track of time, hours had already turned into a day.

And a day into something much harder to explain away. Police went to the apartment Savannah and Matthew shared in Leon Valley to check on them directly. What they found didn’t look like a crime scene. It looked like nothing at all. The apartment was empty. But nothing seemed out of place. Savannah’s bags for the hospital were still hanging by the door.

The closet was neatly organized. And on the kitchen counter, a candle was still burning. Whoever had left that apartment, it seemed, had planned on coming right back. They never did. Over the next 2 days, the search grew louder. Flyers went up. Reporters picked up the story. >> We pray to God every day, every night, every day, every minute, every second of the day, we pray to God to bring her home.

To bring her home safely because we need her home. To complete my family again. She was so thrilled and excited about being a mom. She had everything ready for her little boy. This is her picture here. She’s a beautiful girl and she’s a beautiful heart. She’ll help anybody. And I want somebody to help us to bring her back home.

>> This is 18-year-old Savannah Nicole Soto. Her mom tells KENS 5 she left home for the hospital where she was supposed to be induced, but Savannah never showed up. Police fear that she may be in imminent danger. The teen may be traveling in a 2013 gray Kia Optima with temporary tags. If you know where Savannah may be, call the Leon Valley police at that number on the screen.

>> Mommy, please come home. No one’s going to judge you. No one’s going to say nothing to you. I just want you to be home. >> Something’s not adding up here. I want answers and we all want answers. >> On Christmas Day, the holiday both families had spent the past week preparing to celebrate for an entirely different reason.

The state of Texas issued a clear alert. The kind reserved for adults believed to be in genuine danger. For the Sotos, who had buried one child to violence 7 months earlier, the wait carried a particular kind of horror. They already knew, better than most families ever have to, what the worst outcome looked like.

On December 26th, it found them anyway. A tip came in. A car matching the description from the alert had been sitting untouched in the far corner of an apartment complex parking lot a few miles from Savannah and Matthew’s home. When family reached the scene, the car was locked, windows up, exactly as it had likely been for days.

Through the glass, there was nothing left to hope for. Savannah was in the passenger seat. Matthew was in the back. >> Basically said they’re adults, if they want to disappear, they can disappear. And again, I reminded them, you know, the the baby’s overdue. It’s been overdue. They missed a due date. And uh to me, that’s a life-threatening uh you know, it’s it’s we there should have been more urgency.

I never knew a pain like this existed. You know, you’re hear about a uh parent losing a child and you’re like, man, I can’t imagine what they’re going through. It’s it’s exactly how it is. You know, you can’t imagine it. >> Both had been dead for what investigators estimated was several days, both killed by gunshot inside a vehicle that showed no signs of a break-in, no signs of a struggle, nothing to suggest either of them had seen it coming.

And on Savannah’s lap, resting exactly where a mother might hold her newborn, was the car seat bought for Fabian. It hadn’t been there when she was shot. Investigators would determine it had been placed on her afterward, deliberately, carefully, by someone who wanted it found exactly like that. There was no gun in the car.

There was also, investigators quickly noticed, very little of anything else. Savannah’s bag was gone. Matthew’s wallet and keys were missing. A gold chain sat untouched on the back seat. But his rings, distinctive and expensive enough that friends could describe them from memory, were gone. >> What we’re looking at right now is a very, very perplexing crime scene.

>> Whoever had done this hadn’t taken everything. They’d taken specific things. The apartment told the same story a second time. When investigators went back a few days later, the calm scene from the welfare check was gone. Drawers had been pulled open. The closet, once neat enough to photograph, had been torn apart.

A vent cover had been pried off the ceiling. There was no forced entry, meaning whoever had done this either already had a key or had taken one from the car. Somewhere between the day the family reported them missing and the day the bodies were found, someone had let themselves in and gone looking for something.

The question was what? And the answer wasn’t hard to guess. Matthew’s social media told part of the story on its own. Photos with stacks of cash and expensive jewelry alongside posts that made no secret of how he actually made that money, selling drugs. Openly enough that anyone scrolling through his page could see it.

This didn’t look random. Somebody had known exactly who Matthew Guerra was and exactly what he might be worth robbing. That still left the biggest question of all, who? The break came from two sets of security cameras. The first set outside the apartment complex where Savannah and Matthew lived. Footage from earlier that same night showed Matthew heading out to the parking lot twice.

First to meet one car, then, not long after, another. Whatever those meetings were, they were brief. By the time he came back inside for the last time, his tracksuit and his jewelry were still clearly visible on camera. Within the hour, he and Savannah would leave together in the Kia. It was the last time either of them would be seen alive on any camera that could identify them.

The second set of footage came from the parking lot where the car was eventually found. And it was this footage that gave investigators their first real look at what had happened. Just before midnight, the Kia pulled in. Roughly 5 minutes later, a pickup truck followed, slowing as it turned in like the driver wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Both vehicles killed their headlights. A man got out, heavy set, wearing a white tank top, and walked up to the Kia. There was a brief conversation. Then he pulled a towel from his own truck and began wiping down the outside of Savannah and Matthew’s car by hand. Then both vehicles moved together deeper into the lot, into the one corner no camera could reach.

3 and 1/2 minutes later, the pickup truck came back into frame, alone. The Kia never moved again. There was one more detail buried in that footage, one that wouldn’t fully make sense until much later. In the instant the man in the white tank top reached back toward his truck for that towel, it looked, just for a moment, like someone had handed it to him from inside the cab.

Which meant the real question wasn’t just who he was, it was whether he’d been alone. The footage went public. Investigators released the clearest image they had, a heavy set man in a white tank top, caught on camera wiping down a dead couple’s car in the middle of the night, and asked anyone who recognized him to come forward.

Someone did. The tip led investigators to a home across town, a 53-year-old man named Ramon Preciado, who lived there with his wife and his 19-year-old son, Christopher. By the time detectives knocked on that door, they already suspected they’d found the man from the footage. What they didn’t yet know was how much bigger this was about to get.

Ramon and Christopher were separated immediately, taken into different rooms for questioning. >> How do you spell your last name, Preciado? >> Preciado. >> Preciado. >> Preciado. >> Okay, Christopher. >> Uh I’ve never been to that, never. >> Uh what’s your middle name, Chris? >> You can call me Christopher, Christopher.

>> Christopher’s first move was to lie. He told detectives he only knew what he’d seen on the local news, footage of his own father in a white tank top, nothing more. He claimed he had no idea what had actually happened to Matthew and Savannah. >> Okay, do you know what this is all about, Christopher? Yeah, do you have any idea why we’re taking the pregnant girl? What What video are you referring Case number three? >> You want to pick up the pregnant >> Wait, you want to pick up the pregnant girl? The missing one?

>> Okay. >> He didn’t know his own front yard had been watching the whole time. Known father in a white tank top, nothing more. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Have a good day. >> He claimed he had no idea what had actually happened to Matthew and Savannah. He didn’t know his own front yard had been watching the whole time.

The Preciado home had security cameras, the kind that don’t just stream live video, but record it. And when detectives pulled that footage, it told a very different story than the one Christopher had just given them. >> And what happened when you arrived here? >> Well, when he arrived at my house, he was kind of agitated right out of me, like, he was like, “Man, I told you to be out here already.

But why aren’t you ready out here waiting for me?” >> It showed the silver Kia pulling up outside the house on the night Matthew and Savannah disappeared. It showed Christopher climbing into the back seat. It showed the car driving off. And a few minutes later, coming back. Confronted with his own doorstep on video, Christopher changed his story completely.

He said he’d arranged to buy a small amount of marijuana from Matthew that night. >> [music] [music] [music] [clears throat] >> Nothing more than a routine deal, the kind he claimed he’d done before. But this time, he said, something felt different. Matthew seemed on edge the moment he got in the car, rushing him, agitated in a way he’d never been.

Christopher said that when he reached for his phone to use the flashlight, Matthew suddenly pulled a gun. >> [music] [music] >> I tried to turn the bathroom. You know, as soon as he does that, he actually goes like this. He pulls the little gun up on me. I didn’t know what to do at that point.

>> What happened next, in Christopher’s telling, was chaos. >> I was like, “What?” [music] And then he like he like he pointed it at me and he just continued to yell at me and he was like, “Get out of the car.” And he just kept asking me that and I didn’t want to. I was like, “I couldn’t get my hand on the trigger right away.

” You know, he stopped he stopped I had it like this. And then the girl stopped. He stopped when I seen the girl and I didn’t know what I was doing with this. After he did that, I could tell he was trying to pull it on me, so he was like like that pretty much and like this, you know? So, I go like that. And then he pulls it.

Was it loaded? And then and then he pointed it at the back seat. >> Higher in the back seat? And he’s pointing it at the girl that was out in the back seat? >> Yeah, so I know in the back seat like I push it cuz I don’t want it in my face, you know, like this, so I just go like that and I try to push it away.

And then I try to duck down cuz I don’t want it to hit me. And he just went like that and he started yelling, “Babe.” I didn’t know he was yelling but cuz I heard the my ears were all ringing. >> He said he shoved the gun away with an open hand while Matthew’s finger was still on the trigger and that it simply went off, striking Savannah, 9 months pregnant, in the passenger seat.

He said a second struggle followed and a second shot hit Matthew. >> Did he push it? >> I pushed it. Yeah, he didn’t shoot her. He didn’t >> He already had his finger on the trigger and the gun was facing you. >> It was facing you? >> Yes. >> Yeah, he already had his finger on the >> And then he had his finger on the trigger.

I pushed it and we like I guess he thought I was going to grab something but I don’t have anything to grab. >> Mhm. And then uh so you’re saying he shot her? Okay, so you’re saying he shot her and where is she bleeding from? >> It looked like she just started bleeding like right here. >> On the left side of her neck. Yeah, obviously he did hear right.

What was that you were doing on the left side of her neck? >> [music] >> She’s like she’s like she’s just yelling babe >> He insisted from that very first interview onward that none of it had been his intention. That he’d only been trying to survive a drug deal that had gone wrong in someone else’s hands, not his own.

It was a version of events that might have held up if the evidence in that car had matched it. It didn’t. Detectives compared Christopher’s account to where the injuries actually were, to how the shots would have had to travel to land where they did, and the geometry didn’t work. Recreating the angles he described from where he said he was sitting to where the gun would have needed to be pointed turned out to be next to impossible.

Something about his story wasn’t just incomplete. It was wrong in ways that mattered. >> Okay. >> [music] >> Like the pressure was inside of like that like I did the first time like that. Mhm. It went like that. >> Okay, so she can shoot. All right, so he is his point if he’s pointing his left hand at you.

All right, so I’m sitting in the driver’s seat. All right, so they said it was in the driver’s seat. >> [music] >> I’m turning this way. All right, I’m looking at I’m looking at the girl, right? You’re in the backseat behind me. All right, so I’m in the driver’s seat. >> [music] >> I’m here in the back here.

Right here in the back behind me. So he’s pointing his weapon at you as as you like it. Right? So his hand and his last bullet in his head. Trying to what he’s doing I pointed here you’re probably going to hit him. You sure as hell ain’t hitting there. And the gun is not coming all the way this way unless like I said unless you grab it and you put it to his head.

>> I didn’t I didn’t even touch his gun. I just kept pushing his hand and pushing it away. Well, no that’s how I touched the gun that’s why I went like that. Okay. >> Where did his gun go? >> I couldn’t tell you. >> I guess I think whenever it went like that and try to do like that and fell in your life uh what happens that you fell in your >> [music] >> in the bottom of the bottom seat? Yeah, yeah, I touched it before.

I didn’t take it cuz then I could touch it. >> Okay. So, you never touched it again? >> Yeah, it was a borrowed law. >> What do you mean? >> I mean you borrowed it you didn’t borrow a law? I don’t know. >> I just got in the law so that I know [music] how this could be used against me. I just >> I saw him in the back there.

I told my dad to pick me on this side. He picked me up in the >> [music] >> Oh, you and me had these purposes and your dad comes to this car and he says that >> He was the first one to try to talk to me and I’m like, “Just go over there real quick.” He’s like, “Did you steal this? Did you steal this?” And I’m like, “No, no, no.” He was talking to the guy.

He was over there. You know, that’s what I fell through the space and then >> And then there was his father. Christopher insisted Ramon had no idea what had happened. That when Ramon came to pick him up that night, he never even looked inside the Kia. But the same surveillance footage that had already caught him in one lie, caught him in another.

It showed Ramon leaning directly into the vehicle. Close enough to see exactly who and what was inside. On January 3rd, 2024, both men were arrested. >> Why did you do it? Are you sorry for what happened? Did you know that she had a baby inside of her? >> Did you know she was pregnant? >> Did you do it? Were you involved? >> Go ahead.

Two individuals we we just walked out today again is a father and son. The first individual is the father, the second individual is the son. Uh they’re going to be charged the the father’s uh sorry, the son’s going to be charged this this afternoon this evening with capital murder and the father’s going to be charged with abuse of a corpse.

So, we do expect [music] uh more charges to be uh to be pending. >> Christopher was charged with capital murder. Ramon was charged with tampering with evidence and abuse of a corpse. Charges that, on their own, told the public something important. Whatever role Ramon had played, investigators believed it began only after Matthew and Savannah were already gone.

For a while, it looked like the case might end there. It didn’t. When the parking lot footage was made public, true crime communities online picked apart every frame of it. And one detail kept surfacing. >> So, I don’t know if you guys are following the case of the missing pregnant teenager out of San Antonio, Texas, Savannah Soto, but there has been some crazy updates in the case.

All right, let me know if this is better. Here we go. You guys can see it? >> Now, I don’t know who these three guys are, but a lot of people are thinking that one of them is the boyfriend of that one chick who was talking all that crap about Savannah on her Instagram and then her TikTok. >> There was a lot of misinformation out there.

These two individuals are so are the only sus- suspects that we were looking for. They they were arrested There were many names being thrown around on the internet. Uh those people had nothing to do with this. We we vetted them and and everything. They They didn’t have anything to do with these murders. >> In the moment, the man in the white tank top reached back toward his truck for that towel.

It really did look, to a lot of people watching closely, like someone inside the cab had handed it to him. Investigators had wondered the same thing. Seven days after the first arrests, they made a third one. Cameras near the Presiado home showed something worth a second look. That on the same night Christopher climbed into the back of Matthew’s Kia, his mother, Myrta Romanos, had followed Ramon out to his truck.

>> Myrta, as the mother, how can you you be involved in this? >> Myrta, did you did you give anything to your side? >> Are you talking to the family? >> Did you Did you say anything to them? Did you give anything for your life to using this murder? >> Why did you do it? >> There was a lot of information on social media that there was a third individual involved.

Our homicide detectives were aware of that. However, we were looking for enough probable cause to make that arrest and to present the best case forward to the DA’s office. Today, that happened. They were able to develop enough evidence to charge 47-year-old Mirta Ramos. She is believed to be I’m not sure exactly what the relationship is, but maybe a stepmother to Christopher, 19-year-old Christopher.

She is being charged with three felonies. At this time, we’re confident that there’s no more suspects. At this time, we’re we’re confident that these were the three individuals that were involved in this case. >> She was charged with three separate felonies tied to what happened after the killings. And with her arrest, the case against this family became a case against all three of them.

>> How cooperative was she? You know, I know there was a search warrant that was issued a few days ago. Um There was a search warrant, so they they had the authority to go into that home. Today, I don’t believe she said much. >> They matched her weapon to the ballistics? >> Right. That tampering with evidence from what we understand, she stated that was her gun.

So, we do know that that was her weapon. >> The murder weapon surfaced during the search that followed. A .380 caliber pistol, which Christopher claimed had belonged to Matthew all along. Investigators found it locked inside a closet in Ramon and Mirta’s bedroom. Not tossed aside, not hidden in a panic, but deliberately put away, out of sight.

When police threatened to break the door down to get to it, Mirta suddenly remembered where the key was. The gun was loaded, two rounds in the chamber, a spare magazine with five more beside it. Exactly three bullets were unaccounted for. Two matched the fatal shots. The third matched the casing recovered from inside the Kia.

It wasn’t a coincidence anyone could easily explain away. And the gun itself had a story. It had originally belonged to a woman Ramon had once dated, who told investigators that after their relationship ended, the weapon had simply gone missing. Nobody had reported it stolen. Nobody had reported it at all. It had just quietly disappeared until it turned up locked in a closet three rounds later in the home of the family now facing charges in a double murder and the death of an unborn child.

The months that followed were less about new discoveries and more about the case tightening around the people already charged. Investigators found $160 in cash on the ground near the Presiado home the very next day after the arrests. Bills. And they were stained. Around the same time, messages surfaced showing Christopher had spent the days before the killings scrambling to find money any way he could.

At one point offering up two of Matthew’s rings described in detail down to their engravings as collateral for an unrelated deal. Those same rings later turned up at a pawn shop sold for a fraction of what they were worth. When investigators recovered them, the engravings matched exactly. Still, the legal process moved slowly the way it almost always does.

Christopher sat in the Bear County Jail on a bond set at $1 million. His attorneys asked repeatedly for it to be lowered and were repeatedly told no. Ramon spent more than a year in custody before a judge finally reduced his bond and let him go home to await trial. >> Two murdered people, an unborn child. Anything you want to say about yourself? This is your chance to say your side.

Last chance. >> Murdoch’s case took a stranger turn. Prosecutors pushed her trial date back again and again, citing the need for more time until ultimately they didn’t push it back again. They dropped the charges all together. She walked free without ever standing in front of a jury. A decision that landed on both families like a second injustice stacked on top of the first.

>> How have the last 2 years been? How does it feel to be released from jail? Talking much? How does it feel the last 2 years? Do you believe Christopher and Ramona are innocent? Do you have anything to say to the victims? Anything to say to the family? >> Christopher Preciado’s trial finally began in March of 2026.

>> [music] >> More than 2 years after Savannah and Matthew disappeared. Prosecutors chose not to pursue the death penalty. Which meant that from the opening statements everyone in that courtroom understood exactly what was and wasn’t on the table. >> There are no eyewitnesses for this offense. Nobody’s going to testify that say they saw Christopher Preciado pull a trigger with any sort of intent or deliberation.

>> [snorts] >> There’s no video evidence of this crime that took place. You’re not going to receive any blood spatter evidence that implicates him in this capital murder. There’s no DNA evidence that’s going to implicate him of capital murder. The evidence will show you’re not going to find any evidence of fingerprints of any kind that would implicate him in this capital murder.

A drug transaction gone wrong where a gun is pulled on him by the drug dealer. A struggle and then chaos [music] when shots are fired after that. >> Not whether Christopher would face the harshest possible punishment but whether a jury would believe his account of what happened in that car. The courtroom itself became its own kind of battleground.

Savannah’s family filled the gallery day after day for weeks. Close enough to the man accused of killing her to see his face every time he turned around. The tension wasn’t subtle. At one point during testimony, two of Savannah’s brothers were removed from the courtroom entirely after a deputy decided the way they were staring at Christopher amounted to an attempt to intimidate him.

It was a small moment in a trial full of much larger ones. But it said something true about what 2 and 1/2 years of waiting does to a family. By the time they finally got their day in court, simply sitting still and staying quiet was its own kind of endurance test. His defense hadn’t changed since his very first interview.

It was still a drug deal, still Matthew’s gun, still a desperate struggle that ended in two shots neither one of them meant to fire. His attorneys leaned hard into who Matthew had been outside of that car. The drug dealing, the guns he’d posed with online. A young man they argued had built a life around exactly the kind of risk that got people killed.

If anyone had turned that night violent, they suggested, it wasn’t the 19-year-old in the backseat. Forensic testimony, they pointed out, couldn’t say with certainty which shot came first. Or prove beyond doubt what either young man had been thinking in those final seconds. In a case with no eyewitnesses beyond the people in that car, doubt was the only real weapon the defense had.

And they used every bit of it. Prosecutors told a different story. That this wasn’t chaos, it was calculation. That Christopher had gone looking for a way to solve his money problems and found it sitting in the back of a Kia. That the physical evidence, from the weapon’s condition to the wounds themselves, painted a picture far more deliberate than anything the word struggle could cover.

One especially painful piece of testimony came from the medical examiner who told the jury that Savannah’s injury, on its own, might not have been immediately fatal. That if help had reached her in time, there was a chance she and Fabian could have survived. It was the kind of detail that doesn’t change a verdict so much as it changes how a room breathes.

The jury took less than two hours to decide. >> Christopher is this 19-year-old stoner gamer sitting [music] there. When they picked up his possessions from his room, he had a sweatshirt that says “fertility rocks”. Show the pictures. Can’t find it right now, but they showed it to you all.

This is the kind of guy that they’re saying is this stone-cold executioner, to use Ms. Albin’s word when she started this case, that these people were executed. They’re saying that guy is an executioner. She showed you pictures at the very beginning of Matthew holding a gun. When you look through those Instagrams, which there’s a lot of stuff to look through, there’s picture of Matthew holding a gun.

Matthew holding a long arm, Matthew holding an extended clip. When I was a young prosecutor, I’d put that kind of guy in jail. And now here, we’re calling him a great guy, a family man. He was going to have a baby the next day. They showed you video of Matthew walking in his apartment complex, looking all cool with his track >> [music] >> little uniform on or whatever he was wearing, and he’s happy as a clam cuz he just made two drug deals on video right in front of God and everyone.

He’s just walking around like, “Hey, more money. I don’t got paychecks on this money. IRS don’t even know that I’m making cash.” >> Objection. Facts not in evidence. Sustained. >> You can infer from looking at that video what he’s doing. With the Mercedes-Benz >> [music] >> that I’m sure did not live at that apartment complex, and the Toyota, and he’s walking out there, and then he’s walking back in to go pick up his pregnant girlfriend and take her to another drug deal.

That’s what he’s doing. But they want to portray him as this really great family man, this guy who is going to have a baby the next day. Parenting gone wrong? She’s mom. Savannah’s a mom. Like she’s going to have a baby the next day. They’re supposed to be going in a matter of hours, and she makes a decision to go to a drug deal? Does she not watch TV? >> And we did not shy away from the fact that Matthew dealt drugs to make money.

We were not hiding from that. We didn’t stand up here and try to paint them as these angelic people who never made mistakes. I think I actually said, “You’re going to hear they made mistakes.” Those were my words. And those you have heard. But that doesn’t mean that they deserve what happened to them. That does not justify the execution that this man perpetrated on them.

It doesn’t. You can see Christopher is not this virginity rocks innocent guy that they want you to think he is. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Violence. Extreme. Dr. Molina testified Savannah’s wound that wasn’t necessarily fatal. If somebody would have done something about it, that baby might have been able to to be saved.

This was extreme. This was violence. This was senseless. It was unnecessary, and it was unjustified. It was selfish. It was monetarily based. There was no good reason for it. >> Christopher Preciado was found guilty on all three counts of capital murder. For Savannah, for Matthew, and for their unborn son. Under Texas law, the conviction carried an automatic sentence.

Life in prison with no possibility of parole. At sentencing, the people Savannah and Matthew left behind finally got to speak directly to the man responsible. Not to ask him anything, because by then there was nothing left to ask. But to make sure he understood exactly what he’d taken.

A member of Savannah’s family stood in that courtroom and told him plainly that he hadn’t just killed two people. He’d taken a granddaughter, a great-grandchild, a cousin, a boyfriend who would never become a husband or a father. Fabian, she reminded the room, never even got the chance to be born. No sentence could undo any of that.

There was only the sentence itself, and the fact that for the first time in over 2 years, someone had finally been forced to sit still and listen. >> You took my granddaughter, my great-grandson. You will will never see them again. But I’m glad that they found you guilty. >> And her mother right here. And her father.

They cannot talk, but I will. I will talk for my cousin and her boyfriend. You took their unborn son. He didn’t even have a chance to live. >> Christopher will not have another parole hearing. He will not have another trial date to look forward to. Though his attorneys have since asked for one anyway, filing a motion for a new trial that, as of this telling, has not yet been resolved.

Ramone Preciado’s own case remains unfinished, too. The tampering and abuse of corpse charges against him were scheduled for trial in May of 2026. And then, days before jury selection was set to begin, that trial was abruptly called off. No new date has been announced. Whatever role prosecutors believe he played after his son pulled that trigger, a jury still hasn’t heard it.

There is one piece of this story that did reach a full and final ending. Months before any of this began, Savannah’s own family had already buried her 15-year-old brother Ethan, killed in a setup that had nothing to do with Matthew or Christopher at all. That case moved through the courts on its own timeline, and it closed the way families rarely get the privilege of seeing, with the person responsible admitting what he had done, and a sentence of 40 years to answer for it.

It didn’t undo anything, but for a family that had now lost two of its own to gun violence in under a year, it was, at least, an answer. One they got to hold on to while they kept waiting for the rest. >> Your message to the Nueces County District Attorney’s Office about keeping [music] momentum on this case? >> Um I think that they know uh what’s best to do.

Um you know, I mean, I think they were just as involved as uh Christopher was, and I I’m you know, I think justice should be served when it comes to them, too, as well, the mom and the dad. >> What’s left in the end is a timeline that never should have existed. A couple who spent their last night together in the same city where they’d built a life.

A car seat bought for a baby who never got to sit in it. And a family that had to fight for years just to get one of the three people involved in front of a jury. Savannah Soto and Matthew Guerra didn’t get the ending they were supposed to have. Neither did Fabian, who never took a single breath outside his mother.

What they got instead is this: a story that, like so many true crime documentaries, doesn’t end so much as it stops. The headlines move on, the court dates get rescheduled and rescheduled again, and somewhere in San Antonio, there’s still a nursery that was finished right on schedule for a due date nobody ever got to see.