- 2 days ago
In 2012, 24-year-old Military reservist Alvin Bulaoro was reported missing by his family. Two long weeks later, his body is discovered having sustained gruesome injuries, inside a sleeping bag in the backseat of his car in a parking lot in Fallbrook, CA. Through in-depth police work, law enforcement identified the Fallbrook Country Inn, as the location where Alvin was murdered and zeroed in on Marine base Camp Pendleton and a Marine as their prime suspect
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00:00Medical Examiner is working to ID the body of a man found in Fallbrook wrapped in a sleeping bag
00:18in an SUV. The body was found in the parking lot of a local grocery store. The SUV had been missing
00:25for almost two weeks along with its owner who hasn't been seen since Friday before Christmas.
00:32It was a real whodunit from the beginning and we didn't have much to go on at all other than a
00:38grainy nighttime surveillance video. We are just running around trying everything. NCIS got involved
00:46because Alvin was a member of the Army Reserves. Now we had more things pointing towards this having
00:53something potentially to do with the Marine Corps. You want to find where the crime had occurred
00:58so you could piece the story together on how it unfolded. Once the crime lab got here we went
01:05inside they did their thing and I said yeah there's blood all over the place in there.
01:23Alvin was a member of the Army Reserves and at the time he was a second lieutenant that was
01:44about to be promoted. December 21st 5 or 6 p.m. He took a shower and I asked him after his shower
01:55I said where were you going it's already night and he said yeah I'm gonna go clubbing ma but that's
02:02his routine every Friday. A couple of days pass and the family grows concerned that Alvin has not
02:10contacted them. I got a call from my mom. They haven't heard from him. He would always give my
02:17mom a call like to let us know where he's at. He didn't call me. I know he's always called me.
02:25If he cannot answer me after five minutes ten minutes he called me back. By that time no.
02:34As a mother, as a brother, as a family member. My hands is like you know it's different because if
02:44he's not something happen to him of course he gonna call us. The police they are helping but they always
02:54always said he's an adult. So my son hired a private investigator. He didn't find the clubbing on that Friday in the camera over there.
03:07He didn't find his face over there or anything on that night.
03:14Almost two weeks have passed since Alvin was last seen. And despite the efforts of the private investigator, his whereabouts remain unknown.
03:24January 3rd, there is no progress still. And then I talked to my son. Why don't you call back again to the police and ask them what's going on?
03:36And then the police said to my son, oh you know what? We found out that the plate number of your brother's car is in Albertson parking lot.
03:48Maybe you can take a look over there and maybe is that your brother's car?
03:53So my husband and my son found the car and yeah.
04:03The Bolaro family had to devise the abandoned vehicle as Alvin's SUV. After finding the car was locked, they called the police to inspect the scene.
04:13We were then able to come to that parking lot, secure the area and confirm that this was in fact the victim's vehicle.
04:21They were able to get inside of the vehicle and ultimately they found a body lodged in between the front and rear seats inside of a sleeping bag.
04:32After a body is discovered in the back of the SUV, the detectives are called to the supermarket's parking lot.
04:39Since it was inside of a parking lot, I was guessing there wasn't going to be a whole lot at the scene.
04:48Because my guess was this isn't where the crime occurred. If he got killed at that location in a shopping center, somebody's going to see something or hear something. But nothing. So I didn't think it happened at that location.
05:04We briefed the medical examiner just like we were briefed when we showed up. Tell him what's going on and he says okay and he talks to his partner and they decide to get the transportation vehicle to get the body onto a gurney.
05:19They open up the bag. They see that there's a deceased male in there with multiple wounds, stab wounds, gunshot wounds.
05:25And then they transport the victim to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy the next day.
05:34The car went onto a flatbed tow truck and then driven down to our crime lab and dusted it for prints. We did not get any evidence out of the car.
05:47I had all the deputies go around to all the various stores because this was even though Albertsons is a supermarket, there's other stores all around it kind of like a little outdoor strip mall to go to all those stores to see if they had surveillance, but their surveillance didn't really cover the area that we needed it to cover.
06:06We saw the surveillance video and told the guy this is what we need from this date to this date, check surrounding businesses for video, and then we packed up.
06:21The day after the discovery, the medical examiner confirms the victim is 24-year-old Alvin Bolaro and reveals his cause of death.
06:32Usually the detective and a crime lab personnel, because they do the fingernail scrapings for evidence, that kind of thing.
06:41They collected the two rounds that were found in the sleeping bag.
06:47He had two gunshot wounds to the forehead, 44-plus stab wounds, and the slashed neck.
06:57This was a brutal murder.
07:00They did not yet have a particular location where they could definitively say that Alvin was murdered.
07:07They could say that Alvin wasn't murdered inside of that vehicle because of the lack of forensic evidence in the vehicle that would indicate that a murder as brutal as this had occurred in that one discrete location.
07:20NCIS is on scene at that point in time.
07:25They were brought in because of Alvin's connection with the army.
07:29I was informed that Alvin's vehicle, which had also been missing the entire time since Alvin had last been seen alive, had been found in a parking lot in Albertson supermarket in Fallbrook, California.
07:42And this supermarket is just a stone's throw out the back gate to Camp Pendleton.
07:51Investigators speak with Alvin's family to learn more about his background.
07:57When I give birth to him, he's a little bit brown.
08:04So I said, oh, you know, you are like a cookie, like a brownie's cookie.
08:11That's why we always call him Cookie.
08:14He likes it, so it means he likes to call Cookie, you know.
08:19So we always call Cookie.
08:22Alvin is the oldest, then John, then me, and then my other brother Jason, and then Sophia is the youngest.
08:32Most of my memories with him was, I would say, in the Philippines when we were still like, you know, childhood memories because we love playing outside with our cousins and we live like 10 minutes away from the ocean.
08:49They always make me feel included.
08:52Even there's two boys and then they do like, you know, boy stuff.
08:55Like, I started watching anime because of them when I was a kid.
08:58Because all the TV would just, all the TV shows would just be anime.
09:04When we would walk to visit my grandma, grandma's house, Alvin would carry me on his shoulder.
09:12And then, because I don't want to walk, so he would just carry me on his shoulder to walk to see my grandma and my grandpa.
09:19He likes watching a Korean movie, reading and dancing and singing.
09:27Oh, he loves to sing. He loves karaoke. He loves, um, he, I think my dad still has the karaoke machine.
09:36When we sing together in karaoke, sometimes it just goes on you.
09:43So, like, I would sing, talk, even though it's not a good voice.
09:51He goes to school here, college, to Kaplan University, and then he got his master's in Phoenix University in Murrieta.
10:03John, kind of like his best friend, because they grew up together.
10:07They went to school together, they went to kindergarten, daycare, grade school, high school.
10:13They went to the military together.
10:16He wants to give his family a good future, and then the only thing that he could think of is, like, you know,
10:22joining the military and buy a house for his family, and he was 21 when he bought a house in Fallebrook.
10:29We are proud to be a parents that your son is in the military, serve the country.
10:38I'm sure he loved it, because he made a lot of friends in the military.
10:42I could remember all of his friends coming over to the house and just,
10:46he's a very friendly guy, very friendly person, so he made a lot of friends in the military,
10:51and even up until now, his friends are our friends.
10:55His friends are always like, you know, hey, like, always checking out on us, making sure we're okay.
11:02As investigators with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department focus on piecing together Alvin's movements
11:08from the time of his disappearance, they uncover critical information from his phone records.
11:14That is where the sheriffs were able to really determine that all of his final communications leading up to the very last, you know,
11:23right up to the last moments of his life were with one particular phone number.
11:27When you have a deceased victim, a murdered victim, and you don't really have a clear suspect,
11:41what you start with is you look at the victim. It would be called victimology.
11:44That's all you have to start working on, so start with Alvin.
11:47You know, when was he last seen? What were his communications like?
11:50I wound up interviewing the family first thing Monday morning.
12:00They gave me cell phone records for Alvin's phone.
12:04It just showed calls, a call on this date and the number on this date.
12:08It was like the last 10 or 12 calls that he had made were all the same number.
12:13So that was my next clue to go off of.
12:16Who's this person they talked to 10 to 12 occasions the last time he used his phone?
12:26Alvin's phone records shifted the focus of the investigation
12:29to identifying the person he repeatedly communicated with prior to his death.
12:34We had a starting point. We had a phone number.
12:36And another thing that you can start to track from a phone number
12:39is every time it's used, it can be geolocated.
12:44Every time that phone either makes a phone call or sends a text message,
12:47it's pinging off the closest cell phone towers to it.
12:52And it pinged off of a tower on Camp Pendleton every time he used it.
12:58So I'm thinking, okay, he looks like he's in the military
13:01and this thing's pinging off the base every single time he uses the phone.
13:05So that led me to believe that this guy was in the military.
13:18When we discovered Alvin had been killed,
13:20a lot of effort had gone into who was in communication with him
13:23in the final days and moments before he went missing
13:26and was ultimately found to have been killed.
13:28It all came back to a specific phone number.
13:30We didn't know who the phone number was registered to.
13:32All we knew was it had been purchased under an alias of Michael Walsh.
13:35That phone number, for most of the communications,
13:39that phone number had with Alvin Ballaro's phone,
13:41it pinged off of a cell phone tower in this rest area.
13:45So if you look around, you see that there's just basically ocean,
13:50a highway, the rest area, and this 41 area on Camp Pendleton.
13:55So for someone to sit and have extended text exchanges with somebody,
13:59they'd have to be stationary in one of these areas to keep hitting the same cell phone tower.
14:04So the thoughts were either that someone was pulling over to this rest area
14:09to make all those text messages, or that they lived someplace very close to this cell phone tower,
14:14which would, the only place that makes any real sense would be the 41 area on Camp Pendleton.
14:18And if you look off towards the mountains, across the highway is a large part of Camp Pendleton to include the 41 area housing.
14:27All those beige buildings with the red roofs are the housing in the 41 area of Camp Pendleton.
14:33The best comparison I could make for what the barracks are like once you're inside is a college dorm room.
14:39There's just long hallways with rooms on either side that have one or two Marines living in them.
14:46All the mountains you see all behind there, that's all part of Camp Pendleton.
14:51So it's all used for training, for doing, you know, mountain warfare training,
14:56for just doing combat maneuvers up in the hills.
14:59This is also, on the other side of this fence line, is also still part of Camp Pendleton going up as far as you can see.
15:05It extends about, about another 18 miles that way going up the coast is all part of Camp Pendleton.
15:14It is now up to NCIS to conduct a thorough investigation of the Army base.
15:20Once you've kind of hit a bit of a wall, you have to be willing to try some long shots.
15:27We took those grainy surveillance images from the, of the vehicle in the Albertson parking lot,
15:34and we would spend days driving around the 41 area, trying to see if the shape and scale of the back of the car matched any cars we saw.
15:43And we would pull license plates. And then we would go back and we would run every license plate,
15:48then run every California driver's license, just trying to look for someone who matched the appearance of the person we had on the Radio Shack surveillance footage.
15:57We ran hundreds of license plates and driver's licenses, unfortunately all to no avail.
16:03But that was some of the efforts that we started making, again, trying to focus on what can we do from the base side.
16:09Because now we had more things pointing towards this having something potentially to do with the Marine Corps.
16:22The San Diego Sheriff's Office and NCIS face significant challenges in tracking down the suspect,
16:27but they make sure to follow every available clue that might lead them to a break in the case.
16:32We were up in Fallbrook, going to the family, trying to get more information.
16:37Asked them about the sleeping bag. Did Alvin ever own a sleeping bag? They said he didn't.
16:45Our NCIS agent, while I was talking to family, took it upon himself to grab another detective and go to Camp Pendleton,
16:53to the exchange where they sell items, to see if they sell that sleeping bag on base that Alvin was found in.
17:01Everything that goes with the body stays with the body until after the autopsy is over,
17:07which would include, in this case, the sleeping bag that he was in.
17:10You're not going to remove him from the sleeping bag at that point.
17:14It's all going to go together as one package.
17:17But after the autopsy, the sheriffs were able to seize the sleeping bag as evidence.
17:23And so what they got was the brand name, the make, and the model of that sleeping bag.
17:29It would be forensically processed.
17:33Possibly you're going to find the DNA of the person who manipulated the body into the sleeping bag.
17:37But that's only useful if that person has already been arrested for something else,
17:41and their DNA is in our system, which is called CODIS, which, once you're arrested, you're in there.
17:47And if they find unidentified DNA on a crime scene, it could pair back to that and tell you whose it is.
17:53But what you need to have there is that only helps if your suspect has already been arrested for something else.
17:58Most military members do not have a criminal history that has their DNA in CODIS.
18:03So it's been processed for that.
18:04But one thing that we decided to try was looking into who, in and around this area,
18:11sold a make and model of the sleeping bag similar to that in which Alvin Bellaro's body was found.
18:17Started off base with a lot of Walmarts and things like that.
18:22But eventually, after seeing that so much of the activity with the cell phone involved Camp Pendleton itself,
18:28we decided to check with the Marine Corps exchanges on Camp Pendleton.
18:32And in the military, the term exchange, that's a store similar to a Target or a Mall Mart that you'll find on the Marine Corps base.
18:41It's where a lot of Marine Corps folks do their shopping for all kinds of household goods, things like that.
18:45But they will also sell outdoor equipment to include things like sleeping bags.
18:53Investigators visit the Marine Corps exchange on Camp Pendleton to check if there is any record of who purchased this particular sleeping bag.
19:00This lead brings them closer to identifying Alvin's killer.
19:09Allegheny was the brand name of the sleeping bag in which Alvin was found.
19:14I checked on one exchange and they gave me a list of the 13 different types of sleeping bags that they sold.
19:19None of them matched.
19:21Then I checked another exchange and it turns out what I discovered was that they sold the type of sleeping bag that matched the brand name in which Alvin was found.
19:32So I asked them to pull all of the sales of that particular sleeping bag for the month of December, just leading up to when Alvin had been killed.
19:43And they had sold three that month.
19:45Two had been sold on the 17th of December, 2012.
19:49So they were able to pull up the surveillance footage of that transaction.
19:53It was date and time stamped.
19:55Saw an older man somewhere, probably close to 60 years old, walking up and he bought two sleeping bags and a bunch of other things.
20:03We wound up contacting that man and he had honestly purchased these things for a camping trip with his grandchildren.
20:08It couldn't have been a more innocuous purchase.
20:10The sale of the third sleeping bag was on 21 December, 2012, the night that Alvin went missing.
20:25It was a real whodunit from the beginning and we didn't have much to go on at all.
20:33But when we got the phone number off the phone records from Alvin's brother and then we got the sleeping bag, it all started to fall into place.
20:46So got rather excited when I heard that information.
20:48I was there by myself, but it's always better to have a second person around when you're, you might be discovering a very key piece of evidence.
20:54So I called down to the San Diego Sheriff's Department and Dave Hillen was on another lead at that point.
21:01So it was a detective there named Brian Patterson, who I'd worked on a previous murder with, got in touch with him and he came racing up from the San Diego Sheriff's Department.
21:09And I was like, we have the sale of the sleeping bag the same day of the murder.
21:15They have very good surveillance video.
21:17Like you see that video, you go, yeah, I know who that is.
21:20That kind of, and you know, just over shots, shoots the, uh, the checkout counter.
21:26So you could see the person, you could see them put their card in.
21:31It would look like a casino with the amount of security cameras they had.
21:35What we had was an overhead camera shot looking down on someone walking up and you see a person walking up.
21:41He's got a sleeping bag, an energy drink and a notebook and he puts them on the counter.
21:45And this is a person who's wearing a t-shirt, white male, stalkily built, light colored hair and high and tight haircut.
21:54So at this point, Detective Patterson and myself were like, we have our guy.
21:59This is him.
22:03I did watch him complete the sale at the point of sale with a credit card.
22:06So I knew if nothing else, there would be a credit card transaction that I could ultimately tie back to the person purchasing the sleeping bag.
22:16That itself can take time.
22:18So we decided we're going to try to keep working.
22:21He's like, let's identify this guy right now.
22:23We have him dead to rights.
22:25Let's find out who he is.
22:27So working with the asset protection folks at the exchange, we asked them to pull up every other transaction that that credit card had been associated with.
22:37And they were able to do so.
22:38And we went through them, each one.
22:40And every time he swiped, he would complete the transaction just hitting something on the pin pad, which stores an electronic transaction of the record.
22:47But that is something you'd have to go to the credit card company, the warrant to get that information.
22:52We probably watched over a dozen purchases of his that everything that they had stored on this camera.
22:58And for some reason, I'm not sure why, one purchase at a completely different date, for some reason, there must have been something wrong with the point of sale transaction because he was forced to actually sign a printed receipt, kind of like the old school way of doing so.
23:12And that record actually maintained the name of the purchaser.
23:17And that's the first time we heard the name Kevin Cose.
23:25After Kevin Cose had been identified as the subject of this homicide, they started digging into his background as well, looking at his phone records, his credit card histories, things like that.
23:34We'd already known the credit card was used to purchase a sleeping bag in which the body of Alvin Bolaro was concealed.
23:40What they also identified was that the night of Alvin Bolaro's disappearance and death, Kevin Cose's credit card had been used to reserve and rent a motel room in Fallbrook, California.
23:53Detective Hillen traveled to the Fallbrook Country Inn to inspect if this could be the location where Alvin Bolaro was murdered.
24:00They went to the Fallbrook Country Inn to follow up on that lead, and law enforcement was provided with information that an individual providing that identification of Kevin Cose and that credit card number secured a room at the motel.
24:18And now law enforcement could focus on whether or not this was the particular area that Alvin was murdered.
24:24I went by myself. I didn't expect to find much.
24:31They said they did rent it to a Kevin Cose.
24:34I showed them photographs I had, photographic lineup, to see if they could identify the subject that rented the room, and they picked his photo out.
24:44And I said, well, was there anything wrong with the room?
24:48And they were a little hesitant to tell me, but they eventually did.
24:52And they said, yeah, there was a big red stain on the carpet.
24:55They said they thought it was spaghetti sauce, so they cleaned it up.
24:58There was a hole in the door for the bathroom.
25:02The comforter was missing, things like that.
25:04And I'm like, did you ever think of calling the police?
25:08And they said, no, no.
25:09No, no.
25:17The manager opened up the room for me.
25:19There was nobody in there.
25:21The person had already left.
25:24I knew that was the room because that was the room they told me they had cleaned.
25:27I'm just looking at the room from the doorway, and I don't really see anything out of the ordinary until our crime lab people get there, take photographs, measurements, look for blood evidence, any type of evidence, maybe a shell casing, a knife, who knows what we might find.
25:48That's when I went in after they did their thing, and they were showing me all the specks of blood that are on the baseboard, on the wall.
25:58They peeled back the carpet, and like most carpets, there's a carpet pad beneath it, a kind of a quarter-inch thick spongy material.
26:05As they peeled back the carpet, they saw deep reddish brown stains soaked into the carpet pad beneath the visible carpet, which had an appearance similar with saturated blood having soaked through the rug and into the carpet pad underneath.
26:20There was a large volume of blood stained into that carpet pad underneath the rug.
26:26So we cut that out, took a piece of that, they took it to the crime lab, they expedited it, I got a phone call that night that that was Alvin's blood.
26:37I have been doing this for 18 years now, and I can say without a doubt that is the most violent murder I have ever encountered.
26:48With the amount of blood that had soaked into the carpet pad, and the amount of injuries, and we're talking about head wounds, gunshot wounds to the head, we're talking about stab wounds multiple to the torso, in the areas of the heart, neck.
27:07You know, these are going to be heavily bleeding injuries.
27:13I can't even, the place must have just been absolutely covered in blood.
27:18A lot of it depends on how long Alvin would have been able to be up and moving about, for how widely distributed the blood would have been in the room.
27:26The amount of blood that Alvin would have lost from the amount of injuries he's had, it must have been just, just shocking to be in that room.
27:39He had befriended Alvin, or Alvin befriended him on Facebook, so there was messages going back and forth.
27:45That's how they made their meat, to originally show up.
27:49The purpose of luring someone to kill them is you get them to a isolated place that you control.
27:58You get them with their guard down, thinking that they're going to meet somebody for what should be something positive.
28:06But you get them into a motel room that may have already been staged and prepared to help Kevin commit the murder.
28:14I believe the entire time the motivation was to kill Alvin Bolaro.
28:25It was now clear to investigators that Alvin Bolaro had been murdered in the motel.
28:33Investigators had to go through extensive amounts of video surveillance to piece together how Alvin's body was transported back to the supermarket parking lot.
28:40And now this connected to their main suspect, Kevin Cosay.
28:46We looked at the Chase Bank and I actually had deputies go to each one of these stores here.
28:52But they went and checked and the only one that had video of that spot was the Albertsons.
28:57We found out that Albertsons had good video.
29:02So we checked the video out inside Albertsons and we saw the suspect and the victim meet up.
29:10And a couple hours later, we see them come back.
29:13One person got out of the car, got into his vehicle and left, and the other car stayed here.
29:18That was on the 21st of December.
29:24That was a two week span that they had to review surveillance footage for.
29:28And it takes a lot of time.
29:29These are cameras that are constantly running and constantly recording, capturing any motion that's occurring in the parking lot.
29:36As they study the CCTV footage more closely, they uncover a significant detail about the night of Alvin's disappearance.
29:48A man gets out of the dark sedan, walks over to Alvin's car, gets into Alberts' car, and they leave the Albertsons' parking lot together just sometime shortly after 8.40 p.m.
29:58At around 11.30 p.m. on the same day, you see Alvin's vehicle drive back into the parking space where he's ultimately found.
30:07You see a man get out of the car.
30:09He briefly checks the trunk of Alvin's vehicle, goes back to the sedan that you saw pull into the parking lot just before Alvin did, and he drives away.
30:19So what we had at that point was a very grainy image of the suspect leaving Alvin's car and getting back into his own vehicle.
30:32Investigators are able to uncover Alvin's final moments, including the location where he was killed.
30:37As they collect more evidence linking their main suspect, Kevin Cose, to Alvin's murder, they find that the phone belonging to the suspect was close to the parking lot on the night Alvin's body was discovered.
30:50The night we recovered the vehicle with the body in it, that burner phone pinged off the tower right across the street from Albertsons.
31:05So he drove back to the scene as we were recovering Alvin's body and car.
31:14My theory is he was on military leave, and that was supposed to go into sometime in January, and he came back like two days early.
31:26Nobody in the military ever comes back early from leave.
31:30They just don't do that.
31:32I think he came back to get the car to make it go away.
31:40He was going to drive it somewhere and burn it.
31:43That's my theory of what he was going to do.
31:45We never recovered the keys for Alvin's car, but we saw him.
31:49We saw Cose lock the car with the alarm keys before he took off.
31:55So we knew he had the keys and we never recovered them.
31:58I'm sure he tossed them after we found the body in the car.
32:02They ran the background on that phone number that had been contacting Alvin Bellaro in all the moments leading up to his death.
32:13That phone number was assigned to a prepaid phone that had been purchased in Oceanside, California.
32:18It's going to be one of these over here.
32:25I went inside and I talked to one of the workers and told them what I was there for.
32:32And the guy was very helpful and said, sure, come on down.
32:35And he helped me with the surveillance video and finding the purchase on the video and the information the subject gave when he purchased it.
32:45What I found there was the video of Kevin Cose purchasing the phone and the information he provided to the clerk during that purchase, a name, an address.
32:56It's a prepaid phone. You can purchase a phone that already has minutes on it.
33:00It's got cellular service.
33:01And typically when you get there, they will ask you for a name, a secondary phone number, maybe an email address, something like that.
33:09And they learned by then that Kevin Cose had given the name Michael Walsh.
33:13He had not provided any kind of identification or anything like that.
33:18He had just identified himself as Michael Walsh.
33:20The Radio Shack employee reported he'd asked the person identifying himself as Michael Walsh if he had a backup phone number to assign to this prepaid phone he was buying.
33:31And Kevin Cose said, no, he didn't have a phone number.
33:35But the Radio Shack employee found that suspicious considering he'd seen him texting on a phone the entire time he was in line.
33:41And then when he was asked to provide an email address, he said he didn't have an email address.
33:45Police had gathered enough evidence to prove Kevin Cose was the killer.
33:52Now their next task is to track him down.
33:56With the name Kevin Cose, C-O-S-E-T, it was not a super common name, was able to very quickly run him through military records.
34:05I could just do that over the phone calling back to our headquarters.
34:08And it turns out there was a corporal, Kevin Cose, who was assigned to Camp Pendleton at that time.
34:13And he lived in the 41 area where all the cell phone activity had been occurring from.
34:18This seemed like the kind of person who was already, for lack of a better term, good at this.
34:23He'd been getting away with it now for almost three weeks.
34:26He'd gone completely undiscovered up until this point.
34:29So he was a real concern, this is the kind of person who does kill again.
34:33The surveillance folks had been watching Kevin Cose throughout the day.
34:37This was towards the end of the afternoon.
34:39He'd come home from work, he was just back in his barracks room.
34:42And one thing that they observed and they recorded was that he seemed hypervigilant.
34:47When he stepped out of his car, they said he was very obviously scanning his environment the entire time.
34:54They said before he went into his room, before he unlocked the door,
34:57once again he was checking his surroundings the entire time.
35:09I've been a part of a lot of arrests of even violent people.
35:12I've fortunately never had to see it go poorly where the arresting agent or officer actually had to shoot somebody.
35:19This was probably as close as I ever thought I was going to come to seeing deadly force need to be used to execute an arrest.
35:26Agent Kierman rushed to secure an arrest warrant as quickly as possible and raced back to Camp Pendleton to apprehend Kevin Cose.
35:44They had his, one of his commanders call him to come pick up a package at a nearby office.
35:54As Kevin was walking from his barracks room to go pick up this package that didn't exist, the arresting officers quickly collapsed on him.
36:04I was there for it.
36:05I was there for it.
36:06There was no doubt these were guys who are good at what they do when it comes to executing commands and tactically putting someone in custody.
36:14And so they, you know, police, turn around, get down on your knees.
36:18He seemed very surprised, but he got visibly angry.
36:24I was very concerned.
36:25I was like, oh, this is, this could go badly because instead of putting his hands up, turning around and following the commands and he, the commands were being repeated.
36:33Turn around, face away from me, get down on your knees.
36:36Kevin was not doing it.
36:37He was just locked eyes with the person that was giving the commands.
36:41And there was another person off to the side who had a gun pointed at him and he started to blade his body, which is a sort of a sign of a getting ready for a fight.
36:49And he's now looking them both up and down.
36:51And you can tell this is a person who's trying to assess, can I take these two in a fight?
36:58And they're pointing guns at him, but you can tell he is not afraid.
37:02And they are ratcheting up their commands.
37:04If you make a move, I will kill you.
37:06I will shoot you.
37:07Do not do anything.
37:08And once they finally get him down on the ground and on his stomach and they handcuff him, that's when they discovered that even though he was just walking from his barracks room to his boss's office, he had a semi-automatic handgun, talked into the rear waistband of his camouflage pants, and he had a knife in one of his pockets.
37:30So he was armed with two weapons at the time of the arrest, just walking around base.
37:35They find a pair of his shoes with blood on them.
37:42When they analyzed that blood, it belonged to Alvin.
37:46There was a journal in his room, handwritten, dated.
37:52And one of the entries was, I had to kill for the third time tonight, a man in Fallbrook named Alvin Bolaro.
38:03We tried to find out if there's any other victims.
38:05We tried other areas, like Virginia, because he was stationed in Virginia at one time.
38:10He drove from Virginia out here.
38:12We were checking all along the freeways, whatever agency was in charge of that particular area, to see if they had any murders at, like, rest stops or something like that.
38:22And then I was thinking, maybe he killed a couple people while he was in the military overseas.
38:26I don't know.
38:27So we were trying to find if there was, we never found if there was any other victims.
38:31He made some reference to Alvin being a member of some conspiracy group that he thought was trying to ruin his life.
38:40He had done so much preparation.
38:42There was a consideration among some that he put that there, maybe hoping that if he was ever caught, he could try to say, I'm insane and I'm not guilty by reason of insanity.
38:52So what his actual motivation was, I don't know, but there was nothing to say that he had a reason to violently hate Alvin Bolaro that he'd never met before.
39:01And there was nothing in the rest of his life to indicate that he was some sort of paranoid schizophrenic who actually thought he was the target of some vast conspiracy.
39:10I just thought, oh, this is great. Thank you.
39:15That's a kind of like a written confession because we did have him do handwriting analysis later on so that he couldn't come back and say, no, I didn't write that.
39:24And it showed that that was his handwriting.
39:27As investigators prepared for court, the pretrial hearings are repeatedly postponed and Alvin's family are forced to wait years for the trial.
39:38It's a lot of drama before. Yeah. And then the cases keep on, on and off. It's so unfair for us to keep going in the court.
39:53There are a lot of postponement because he always, he's that acting drama that is like crazy.
40:01It's a lot, goes to five years, more than five years before goes to the jury.
40:13In 2018, the wait was finally over as Kevin Cozet finally faced the jury.
40:19However, just an hour into the proceedings, things take an unexpected twist.
40:24He pled guilty on that time.
40:30And by taking the plea, he got a lesser sentence.
40:36He got sentenced to 51 years.
40:39I think that was an appropriate sentence given the allegations that the defendant pled to as a first degree murder.
40:46That charge carries a possible prison term of 25 years to life.
40:50The gun allegations that attach to that also carry a 25 year to life potential sentence.
40:56And then there was the use of the knife, which carries a one year term.
40:59So adding that all together, the court essentially gave the defendant the maximum possible sentence it could under the terms of the plea.
41:08After a prolonged judicial process, there is justice for Alvin Bolero.
41:15But his tragic loss is felt every day by his family.
41:19He's so hard for me as a mother.
41:24Every minute, every hour, I always remember him.
41:27When I go out every night, facing to my children, I need to be happy because I don't want them to...
41:33I don't want them to...
41:38I don't want them to think about me that I'm depressed.
41:43I'm...
41:46It's so hard. We are so very happy.
41:49And then all of the sudden, very quick, that...
41:54What's going on? So hard.
41:58I always dream about him.
42:03He always visits in my dream.
42:05And all of my dreams were just him laughing and just being jolly.
42:11And then I think one day I woke up and I told myself, like, maybe he wanted to remind me that, hey, it's okay.
42:20So I told myself, like, you know, it's okay.
42:25Because even in my dreams, he wants me to know that he wants to be remembered as a happy person.
42:34And it's okay.
42:36I don't want to go as a happy person.
42:39But each one day I met him because I love him.
42:43I really have to they have to know that he wants me to be remembered as a happy person.
42:45And he wants to be remembered as a happy person.
42:47And I do nothing to see.
42:48I don't know.
42:49I don't know.
42:50I never want to go as a happy person as I want to be remembered as a happy person.
42:53I mean, he can't do anything but my father's friend.
42:55And he's not, I've lost all the time.
42:58I can't do anything but my father has to be like.
42:59And he's not...
43:01I'm still...
43:02I'm still...
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