On Thursday, the adoptive parents of two young California boys who went missing in 2020 pleaded not guilty to killing them. The couple, 35-year-old Trezell West and 32-year-old Jacqueline West, entered their pleas to two counts of second-degree murder, two felony counts of willful cruelty to a child, and a misdemeanor charge of making a false report of an emergency in Kern County Superior Court.
The charged parents could face 30 years to life in prison if convicted. The judge called them "a significant and substantial risk to public safety," ordering authorities to hold them without bail. The Wests were arrested on Tuesday night and were indicted by a grand jury. Their trial is tentatively scheduled for May 23.
The Wests' arrests are the latest chapter to a tragic story that has captivated the nation. The West couple grabbed the headlines before Christmas in 2020 when they reported their sons Orrin West and Orson West missing from their family's backyard in California City.
Search for the young West boys ends in disappointment
Authorities and the community in California City, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, launched a massive search effort for the West brothers. Trezell West told local reporters during the first week of the search that his young sons were playing outside when they suddenly went missing. He said that he was moving firewood at that time while his wife was wrapping Christmas gifts inside their house with their other children.
West said, "I saw them there, go in the house, I came back out, I didn't see them now. I realized that I left the gate open, and I panicked." West returned inside the house and searched it with his wife before going outside in his van to find the boys on the streets. West decided to call the police when it got cold, dark, and wet, and he could still not find the boys. The long search ended in disappointment, though, with Orrin and Orson, who were aged 4 and 3 respectively at the time of their disappearance, never found.
Adoptive parents allegedly killed their sons 3 months before the search
Officials made a stunning revelation this week why that was the case. Apparently, the young West boys were killed three months before officials began searching for them. Bakersfield Police Chief Greg Terry told reporters this information in a press conference, saying, "We now realize that the search for the boys began after the real tragedy had already occurred."
According to Kern County District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer, a 14-month investigation showed the West couple killing their young sons three months before they reported them missing, as reported by the ABC News. Investigators arrived at that conclusion even though the boys' bodies were not found, with Kern declining to provide details of their findings until the Wests' trial. Kern said, however, that the evidence that the police presented was enough for the grand jury to indict the adoptive parents for the killings.
