A Hundred Searches for Trash Pickup Times: The Killing of Duke Josehyah Flores

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 16, 2025

Duke Josehyah Flores was six years old in April 2019, living in a home in the 22000 block of Cherokee Avenue in Apple Valley, California, with his mother, Jackee Raquel Contreras, his aunt, Jennifer Rachel Contreras, who was Jackee's twin sister, and Jennifer's two young children, including an infant daughter. Duke was Hispanic, small for his age at three foot ten and fifty five pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes, and he was autistic. What should have been an ordinary household raising young children together turned, sometime in the middle of April 2019, into the scene of a killing that would not come to public attention for weeks, and a body that to this day has never been recovered.

Two Weeks of Silence

On April 25, 2019, Duke's grandmother, Lydia Gutierrez, grew concerned enough about not having heard from or about her grandson that she requested a welfare check, prompting sheriff's deputies to respond to the Cherokee Avenue home around ten that night. When deputies arrived and asked about Duke, Jackee told them she had not actually seen her son in more than a week. Investigators quickly determined that Duke had, in reality, been missing for closer to two weeks by that point, an unreported absence that had gone unnoticed by anyone outside the household for far longer than anyone should have been able to explain away.

Jackee was taken into custody almost immediately, initially on suspicion of child neglect tied to the significant delay in reporting her own son missing. Investigators pressed further, and on April 27, following additional interviews, Jackee was charged with murder in connection with Duke's disappearance. Jennifer was arrested on the same charge shortly afterward. According to Duke's grandmother, conflicting explanations had circulated within the family in the days before the arrests, including one account suggesting that some kind of discipline directed at Duke, tied to an earlier incident involving one of Jennifer's own children, might have gone too far.

What Detectives Say Happened

What investigators eventually pieced together, based largely on statements from Jackee herself during police questioning and testimony later given at a preliminary hearing by Detective Narcie Sousa, described a sequence of events almost too disturbing to fully absorb. On April 14, 2019, while Jackee and Jennifer were outside hanging laundry in the backyard, they heard a scream coming from inside the garage. When they went to investigate, they found Duke inside, allegedly in the act of trying to smother Jennifer's infant daughter with a pillow.

According to the account that emerged from the investigation, Jennifer's reaction was immediate and final. She reportedly said something to the effect of having to kill him, and took Duke outside. From there, according to the case laid out by prosecutors, Jennifer placed a plastic bag over Duke's head and wrapped a power cord around his neck, while Jackee, his own mother, bound his hands with a second cord. Jennifer then strangled him. Afterward, the two sisters wrapped Duke's body in a blanket and a bag and buried him in the backyard of the same home where he had been living just moments before.

Dug Up, Loaded Into a Wagon

The concealment did not end with that initial burial. Approximately seven days later, on Easter Sunday, the two women reportedly dug Duke's body back up from the yard, apparently having decided the original burial site was no longer safe or adequate, and began searching for a new place to dispose of him entirely. Investigators later obtained video surveillance footage showing two adults moving through the neighborhood with a wagon and a stroller, the wagon carrying what was described as a large item. According to the case investigators built, that item was Duke's body, pulled roughly three blocks from the family home before being deposited in a dumpster.

In the investigation that followed, detectives recovered Duke's iPad and found close to a hundred separate searches related to local trash pickup schedules, a pattern of searches that, laid out in a court proceeding, painted about as clear a picture of premeditated disposal as any piece of digital evidence could provide. Investigators would later learn that the original backyard burial site had been at least partially uncovered by family dogs before the women returned to move the body, a detail that helps explain the urgency behind the second, more elaborate disposal effort involving the wagon and the dumpster.

A Landfill Search That Found Nothing

Once the scope of what had happened became clear, San Bernardino County authorities launched an extensive search effort at the Victorville landfill, the presumed final destination for the dumpster where Duke's body had reportedly been left. Search crews sifted through an enormous volume of waste, reported at points to be in the range of six hundred tons of trash, over a search effort that stretched across roughly eight weeks. Despite that effort, no trace of Duke's remains was ever found. Jennifer's two young children, who had been living in the same home, were removed from the household and placed into protective custody by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department once the investigation made clear what kind of environment they had been living inside.

Both Jackee and Jennifer Contreras, twenty nine years old at the time of their arrest, pleaded not guilty to the murder charges against them. A judge set bail at one million dollars for each sister, and both were held in protective custody within the jail system, a designation typically reserved for inmates whose cases or notoriety put them at particular risk from other incarcerated people. The case has continued moving slowly through the San Bernardino County court system in the years since, with hearings and continuances extending the process well beyond what anyone following the case might have expected for a matter with as much direct evidence, including an alleged confession from Duke's own mother, as this one has produced.

Reaction from the surrounding Apple Valley community, once details of the case became public, reflected genuine horror at what neighbors described learning about a child discarded like refuse rather than reported, mourned, or protected by the adults responsible for him. One resident, reacting to news of the landfill search, put the sentiment bluntly, saying that the idea of someone throwing a kid out like trash struck him as simply inhumane.

More than six years after Duke Flores vanished from a home on Cherokee Avenue, his case remains legally unresolved even as the broad outline of what happened to him has been laid out in court filings and detective testimony. He has never been found. No burial, no marked grave, nothing beyond a court record describing a wagon, a dumpster, and a search of a landfill that turned up nothing at all. Duke was an autistic six year old boy who, by every account that exists of that April afternoon, reacted to something frightening in a way that six year olds sometimes do, and the adults responsible for his safety decided, in the moments after, that his life was something they could simply erase.

Anyone with information related to Duke Josehyah Flores' case is asked to contact the Apple Valley Police Department at 760-956-5001.

Sources