Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At about 11 o’clock on the night of April 25, 2022, a 14-year-old boy walked out of his mother’s house on West First Street in Deming, New Mexico, to go see his friends.
His name was Ashton Remondini. He was an eighth grader who rode dirt bikes around the edge of town.
Later that night, he sent a message to his girlfriend. He was going out shooting, he told her, with a friend who had an AR-15.
It was the last time anyone who loved him heard from him.
The records of what happened next, including interrogation room video, body camera footage and the sheriff’s evidence files, were obtained by Wicked Crime directly from law enforcement.
A phone that went dark
At 2:39 in the morning on April 26, Ashton’s phone went offline. The last location it gave was on the northwest edge of town, near Silver City Highway and Fairfield Drive.
By morning he was supposed to be home. He wasn’t. Nobody had heard from him since the middle of the night, and his family started to worry.
The next day, April 27, his uncle walked into the Deming Police Department and reported him missing. Ashton was entered into the national crime database as a missing and endangered juvenile.
Detectives started with the last thing he had done: the messages. The final one had gone to his girlfriend, so they brought her in to the police station to talk. At that point, officers told the people around Ashton, he was being treated as a runaway.
But by the time she sat down in that room, something else had already reached the police. A rumor was going around town that Ashton wasn’t missing at all. That he had been shot.
The friend who said nothing
Detectives chased the first name they were given. Then the talk around Deming changed, and it pointed at a 16-year-old named Michael Moody.
Moody was a runaway from Thatcher, Arizona, about two hours to the west. He had hitchhiked into Deming days earlier, and nobody seemed to know exactly where he was staying.
Detectives drove out to a trailer park on South Tin Street to find him. He wasn’t there. Instead they found one of his friends: 18-year-old Rafael Camacho, who lived at the address and who had been with Moody the night Ashton disappeared.
That afternoon, Camacho sat down with a Deming police detective. He gave his name, his address and his date of birth. He was read his rights and signed the form.
Then the detective asked if he was willing to talk.
He wasn’t. He said he would “plead the fifth.”
He was within his rights, and with nothing to hold him on, he walked out of the room.
That night, officers came back to the trailer with a search warrant, hoping to find Moody hiding inside. Their flashlights moved across bedroom walls covered in graffiti. Moody wasn’t there.
Keeler Road
Detectives went back to the one solid thing they had: the shooting videos Ashton had posted the night he disappeared.
Detective James Fetrow of the Deming Police Department knew Luna County well enough to recognise roughly where they had been filmed. The next morning, April 28, investigators drove out into the desert north of Deming and started searching the dirt roads.
About two miles past the Hidden Valley turnoff on Keeler Road, they found Ashton.
He was lying face down in the dirt. He had been out in the desert sun for days, so long that the officers working the scene that night doubted they would be able to identify him by sight.
Around him were spent shell casings from two different guns.
On one officer’s body camera, a colleague asks the question that hung over the whole scene: “He was 14 years old?”
“Yeah.”
“Suspect’s possibly 16.”
“Everything pointed at Michael Moody”
Detectives now had a body. What they didn’t have was evidence. One suspect had refused to say a word and had walked out. The other hadn’t been seen in days. Everything they had heard about the two of them had come second hand.
That evening, while the scene was still being processed, they brought in another young witness. Unlike everyone else who had passed the story along, she told detectives she had been in the room when Michael Moody said he had killed Ashton.
Everything now pointed at Moody. According to his own mother, he had run away. Nobody in Deming had seen him for days.
They never had to go looking for him.
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