The murder was grisly enough. Police say that on Jan. 14 Jason Bautista, 20, and his half brother Matthew Montejo, 15, strangled their mother to death at the family's Riverside, Calif., apartment. But it was the way they allegedly disposed of the body that has shocked even veterans of the force. "They severed her head and hands, wrapped them in plastic bags and placed them in a duffel bag that was found in a hallway closet," says sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino—an identity-concealing routine, he adds, they had picked up from an episode of HBO's The Sopranos. Says Amormino: "It's just hard to imagine."
Indeed, police are still grasping for a motive. An Illinois native, Jane Bautista, 41, moved her sons to California a decade ago and had studied to be a foreign-language interpreter. Jason's father, Armando Bautista, killed himself with a handgun in 1983. Montejo's father, Jose Montejo, split from the family. But neither of the young men appeared unusual, says a family friend, Paula Beam-Toedt, 45. "Jason did well in school but was an introvert," she says. "Matt played baseball and liked sports."
At around 2 a.m. on Jan. 15, a security guard disturbed two figures trying to heave a sleeping bag with a human foot dangling out of it into a Dumpster at an Oceanside construction site. The pair fled with the body, but the guard jotted down their car's license number. Bautista's body (without head or hands) was found later that morning in a roadside ravine, and nearly two weeks later investigators tracked the boys to Riverside.
Arrested at Cal State San Bernardino, where he was studying biochemistry, Jason led officers to the family apartment. The brothers are being held in Orange County jail awaiting a Feb. 14 arraignment, following which Matthew will be tried as an adult. Like the police, Dennis Murray, superintendent of the Perris school district, is left wondering. "Jason was the kind of kid," he says, "who came to school, did what you asked him to do and then went home." What happened there remains a mystery.
Your Reaction
