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