On January 13, teenage mother Alissa Parraz was reunited with her 10-month-old baby following his brief stay in foster care after he was removed from a ramshackle home in the unincorporated San Joaquin Valley town of Goshen, where they both were living with her gang-connected family.
Three days later, the 16-year-old would clutch her infant son, Nycholas Nolan Parraz, to her chest and bolt down the driveway as bullets exploded behind her and four members of her father’s family were executed, one by one, in that house. The first to be killed was her great-uncle Eladio; then her uncle Marcos; before her great-grandmother was shot as she slept; and her grandfather’s girlfriend was executed on her knees, as the teen fled.
At a shoddy wooden fence on the edge of the property, Alissa paused when the blasts inside the house stopped. She then hoisted Nycholas over the barrier and dropped him to a spool in the scrubby grass below. She darted to the nearby chain-link fence and jumped it, like a gazelle, desperate. A surveillance video taken from inside the house shows Alissa vanishing from the frame toward her son, just as a menacing figure enters, his right arm raised to show the outline of a cocked gun in his hand.
Seconds later, a man identified as Noah Beard, 25, chased the mother and child down and opened fire, Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said. The teen mom and her son, he said, were “found dead in the street, both shot in the back of the head” near a scrubby litter-filled ditch. Before their ugly deaths in the mass murder that stunned residents of the San Joaquin Valley, the pretty and petite brunette posted numerous heartbreaking pictures on social media and created TikTok videos with her Nicholas including one accompanied by the Nightcore song Dandelions with the lyric: “I see forever in your eyes.”
On Tuesday, Beard, a known Norteño gang member, will be arraigned on six counts of murder in a Tulare County courtroom. The second accused gunman Angel “Nanu” Uriarte, is still hospitalized with a gunshot wound after he exchanged fire with ATF agents in a Friday predawn raid at his home in Goshen. It remains unclear if he will be arraigned in court, a spokesman for the Tulare County District Attorney said.
Tulare County Sheriff's Department
The arrests on Friday were part of a sweeping takedown by Tulare County and federal law enforcement officials dubbed Operation Nightmare. Warrants were executed at multiple locations and through several California prisons targeting gang members.
Tulare County Sheriff's Department
Boudreaux called the accused men “baby killers” and said “there was no reason” for the shooters to kill the young mother and her child. “I know for a fact this 10-month-old baby was relying on the comfort of his mother. There was no reason for them to shoot that baby, but they did,” he said.
Beard and Uriarte, are now charged with six counts of murder along with special enhancements, including terrorism. The massacre unfolded in a house occupied by at least two members of the Sureños, a longtime Norteño rival gang, said Boudreaux.
Tulare County Sheriffs are familiar with the location, and have made gang-connected arrests there before, according to department records, including the arrest of a 17-year-old arrested on gun charges as a “Southern gang member” in 2017. Years earlier the address was the scene of a drive-by shooting.
Gang violence has gripped rural communities in the San Joaquin Valley, a picturesque, mountainous farming region with orange and olive grows surrounding Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks.
Historically, Bordeaux said, the prison gang Nuestra Familia oversees the drug and gun trafficking that fuels the Norteños in territories north of Bakersfield up to Fresno. But in recent years, la eMe, or the Mexican Mafia, which has strongholds south of the Grapevine in Los Angeles to which the Sureños pay tribute, has spread its criminal enterprise north as a way to seize profits from the rampant illegal marijuana grows expanding throughout the area.
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