A man charged in connection with the shooting death of Ivan Solis last summer appeared in court for his preliminary hearing this week.
Nicholas Colletta, 20, of Saugus, and Jaqueline Arreola, 25, of Newhall, appeared in San Fernando Superior Court on Monday, when a judge heard evidence to decide whether the case should go to trial.
Both suspects were initially charged with murder. Arreola, however, pleaded guilty last month to the lesser charge of being an accessory after the fact.
He’s still facing a murder charge, and his preliminary hearing began Monday, but is scheduled to resume next week on Monday April 9.
“We expect the the hearing for defendant Colletta will end on that date,” Ricardo Santiago, spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told The Signal Tuesday.
All that’s left for Colletta’s alleged accomplice, Arreola, is to be sentenced in connection with her plea.
“(Arreola’s) sentencing was put over to April 9,” Santiago said, “but may be further delayed.”
On the morning of Aug. 10, 2017, she was arrested on suspicion of murder, with bail set at $2 million.
Her arrest happened a month after the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station’s 911 center received a report of gunfire near Abelia Road and Via Gardenia, near Soledad Canyon Road, in Canyon Country.
Responding units found the body of Ivan Solis, who had been shot multiple times, at Begonias Lane Park, between Begonias Lane and Abelia Road.
Arreola was named jointly with her co-accused Nicholas Colletta in a felony complaint filed with Los Angeles Superior Court on Aug. 14, 2017.
Solis died of multiple gunshot wounds as the result of a homicide, Lt. David Smith of the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner told The Signal.
Solis had been shot seven times, twice in the head, twice in the upper torso, twice in the lower torso and once in the right forearm, according to the coroner’s report.
The paths of both bullets through the victim’s head were described by the coroner as back to front and left to right.
In their synopsis of what happened, a coroner’s investigator wrote in her report that the “decedent and several others were a friend’s house when the owner asked them to leave, the decedent left the residence (on his friend’s bike) and went to the park on July 11, 2017.”
Prosecutors allege in their complaint that Solis had been shot for “the benefit of, at the direction of, and in association with a criminal street gang.”
Lt. Rodney Moore of the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s Homicide Bureau described the relevance of the Solis shooting to gangs as “some sort of gang nexus.”
Although homicide detectives are looking for no other suspects in the case, “more work is to be done,” Moore told The Signal shortly after the arrest of Colletta.
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