The Golden State seems to be losing its luster as the paradise that it built itself on being is no longer the same as it once was.
Instead, California has become a state of crime and lawlessness pushed forward by Democratic leaders who are unwilling to hold criminals accountable and take the measures necessary to deter crime in the first place.
And that means the state has countless victims, like Violet Alberts, a 96-year-old woman who was murdered on May 27, 2022, but the details of the crime are only now coming to light.
According to KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, Alberts’ was found by her caretakers in the wealthy Santa Barbara neighborhood where she lived among celebrities like “Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan.”
“In the moments before her death, the 96-year-old was preparing to make cookies to celebrate her upcoming birthday. The ingredients for those cookies were found on the table inside her home when her body was discovered by her caretaker,” the station reported, citing Santa Barbara County Sheriff Brown.
Her home is valued at more than $5 million, according to KTLA.
96-year-old Violet Evelyn Alberts was found dead in her longtime Montecito, California home https://t.co/JgadGBFpat
— RawNews1st (@Raw_News1st) March 9, 2024
Brown announced arrests related to Alberts’ death at a news conference Thursday.
Alberts’s autopsy showed the cause of death as asphyxiation.
According to Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office news release published Thursday, a 22-month investigation revealed the elderly woman unknowingly was caught up in a web of forgery and deceit to illegally obtain her assets upon her death.
Four individuals, 48-year-old Pauline Macareno of Porter Ranch, 58-year-old Harry Basmadjian of Van Nuys, 33-year-old Henry Rostomyan of Tujunga, and 41-year-old Ricardo MartinDelCampo of Los Angeles, were all arrested in connection with the crime.
Macareno was accused of “forging documents and establishing fraudulent entities, to gain control over Alberts’s assets unlawfully,” according to the news release. She was sentenced to six years in state prison after being convicted of fraud related to the case, according to the news release.
However, additional charges related to Alberts’ death are pending, KTLA reported.
According to KTLA, Brown said Macareno had fraudulently gained control over Alberts’ property but grew tired of waiting for the elderly woman to die and hired the men to take care of matters for her.
Rostomyan and MartinDelCampo have been identified as the men who actually entered Alberts’ home to commit the crime, according to KTLA. They are currently in custody without bail on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder Alberts.
Basmadjian’s roled in the killing wasn’t spelled out in the KTLA report. He had previously been arrested for similar charges in a different case before suffering a “life-threatening medical emergency that left him totally incapacitated with a grim prognosis,” according to the news release.
At the news conference Thursday, Brown discussed the complex web of information surrounding Alberts’ death and thanked his officers and detectives for working tirelessly to solve the case.
“There a lot of people and allied agencies to thank today for the extraordinary police work that went into solving this case,” he said.
“But the acknowledgment and gratitude needs to be primarily focused on the diligent efforts of the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office detectives, whose collective dedication, determination and tenacity served to pursue truth and accountability for those responsible for Violet Albert’s murder,” he added.
While seeing those who ended Alberts’s life early face justice is certainly comforting to an extent, it doesn’t change the heartbreaking reality that a life was lost.
California has done so much to supposedly make the state safer, constantly infringing on American’s Second Amendment rights.
And all for what? So that criminals can still kill and attempt to rob innocent Americans?
Those assused of Alberts’ death deserve the presumption of innocence and they deserve their day in court. But if they’re guilty and convicted, what is likely to happen to them? They’ll spend years, possibly the rest of their lives, in prison, living off the taxpayer dollar.
They won’t the ultimate punishment. Gov. Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on the death penalty back in 2019.
While living a life in prison certainly isn’t ideal, allowing the killers to live at all victim makes little sense. Violet Alberts didn’t get the same chance.
It seems the state has been doing more to protect criminals in recent times than its citizens, a consistently backward logic pushed by liberals around the country.
No wonder the state is seeing such a mass exodus.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
