A Perris woman is accused of orchestrating the attempted murder of her child’s father. According to investigators, the payment to the gunman: sex.
20-year-old Judy Avalos was arrested at the hospital where she was visiting her injured boyfriend on December 30 – the day after he was shot four times (and survived!).
Authorities at first thought that the victim was shot as a result of a drug deal gone wrong – then quickly turned their attention to Avalos.
The night of the shooting, Avalos and her 24-year-old boyfriend had gone to Bakersfield together to pick up a vehicle. She followed him back in a separate car. The pair stopped at the home of Avalos’s mother – where she went inside and he waited in his car. That is when the shooting occurred. From The Press Enterprise:
The boyfriend told investigators that the shooter and another man were in a white car that pulled up next to him while he was parked on Edmond Street, search warrant documents say. He said the car had driven past him, stopped for a few minutes at the dead end of the street, then pulled up next to him with a window down.
The men in the car told him they were lost and asked for directions to Highway 74. A minute or two later, he said, one of the men pulled a gun and started shooting at him. He said he grabbed the gun under his seat and fired back at them as the car drove off, search warrant documents say.
“(He) went on to say that Avalos had a strange conversation with him a few days prior,” [Investigator] Robert Cornett wrote. “He said she called him up and asked him if he had been shot at.”
Authorities asked Avalos about that conversation, she claimed that she had dreamt about it, telling authorities that “when she has a dream about things, they come true,”.
Avalos handed her cell phone over to authorities who found deleted text messages she had written saying she wanted to “take out” her boyfriend and that it had to be the night of Dec. 30. And the texts were very detailed:
She wrote that he would be in a Jeep parked in front of her mother’s house and the person replied that he was set with two people for tonight. At 9:24 p.m., Avalos texted to say they were there.
The other person replied, telling Avalos to delete the text messages before “they do their job,” Cornett wrote.
After being arrested, Avalos told the cops that her boyfriend had been mistreating her and not letting her leave the house to go out with her friends, telling them that she “was wrong for what she did but did not know any other way to get out of the relationship.”
The gunman and his accomplice have not been identified. Police believe that the gunman’s compensation for the shooting was not a cash payment but rather a “romantic relationship”.
Avalos has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and is being held in lieu of $1 million bail.
