For the next 12 minutes, a mother and her son talk across a small black table. She tells him about the family pets. She tells him to be good. At 13:18 she uses one word to describe how she feels about him: “Unconditional.”
He tells her about the trip from Arizona, about three different rides, and about moving from one empty house to another. “I barely slept,” he says. “I think I only have, like, good three hours of sleep.”
She asks whether he was taking any other drugs. “I was on Xanax,” he says at 18:47. A little later: “There’s pretty good chance it was laced.”
At 21:18, Tyler comes back. “So do you have anything else you wanna talk about?” she asks.
“Not really.”
She asks for the time and gets it from a phone: 2:04 p.m. “We’re finished with the interview.”
How the detectives got here
The confession in this video did not come out of nowhere. It was the end of nearly four hours of interview, and the record shows how the detectives built it.
They started slowly. Because Moody was 16, Tyler went through each of his rights and had him explain them back to her. He signed the waiver at 10:33 a.m.
They let him talk about running away first. Fetrow later wrote in his report that he talked about how frightened families are when a child goes missing, and that he “used that angle” on Moody, who had not contacted his own family in days. Moody became emotional.
His mother was in the room because he wanted her there. Tyler told him it was his decision, and he said, “I’m not gonna hide nothing from my mom.”
When they finally confronted him, Fetrow said he had Snapchat video of Ashton shooting out there and told him, “I have everything.”
In this last session, the questions are short and specific: pockets, a lighter, water, who knew what. Every answer is something investigators could check against the scene, the car and Camacho’s account.
What he got wrong or left out
Moody’s story changed over the course of the day.
That morning, he said Ashton had pointed an AR-15 at Camacho and that he had fired to protect his friend. “I wasn’t gonna try and kill him,” he said. “Our plan was just to take it,” meaning Ashton’s purple 9mm pistol. By the afternoon, on this video, he calls it revenge and says, “We both planned it.” Fetrow’s report says Moody also admitted that Camacho was holding the AR-15 when Ashton was shot.
He described where his shots hit. Fetrow told him the evidence showed more than he was admitting to. Asked whether Camacho had also fired, Moody said he was not 100% certain. Investigators at the scene collected four 9mm cartridge cases and numerous .223 casings, the caliber of an AR-15.
He said Camacho probably didn’t want revenge “as badly” as he did. When Camacho was questioned that night, he admitted that he had stabbed Ashton too, and that driving out to Keeler Road had been his idea.
Asked where the guns were, Moody said he didn’t know. That night, Ashton’s Taurus 9mm turned up behind a dresser in Camacho’s bedroom.
He also did not bring up Ashton’s death on his own. He walked in as a runaway, and that was the subject for about an hour until the detectives raised the homicide. In this video he says he came in because the police “probably knew about it too.”
The Xanax claim came up only with his mother, after the detective had left. Nothing in the case records we obtained confirms it or rules it out.
What happened to them
Michael Moody was prosecuted as a serious youthful offender. In 2023 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, conspiracy and robbery, and he was sentenced to 28 years in prison, with a concurrent 12-year sentence on the other charges.
Rafael Camacho went to trial. In September 2025, a Luna County jury convicted him of first-degree murder, conspiracy, tampering with evidence, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and larceny of a firearm. In March 2026, District Judge Jarod Hofacket sentenced him to life in prison with a minimum of 30 years, plus 19 and a half years to be served consecutively.
Ashton Remondini was 14. You can read the whole story, from the night he left his mother’s house to the gun found behind the dresser, in our main article: How two teens lured 14-year-old Ashton Remondini into the desert.
