Criminal investigators equipped with shovels and a specially trained dog descended on a home in San Diego this week and started to dig.
They found human remains on the property, and now authorities are trying to figure out what happened.
The San Diego County District attorney’s office announced that they were looking into potential connections between a former resident of the home, Dwight Rhone, 74, and the case.
Mr. Rhone is already in custody, and has been charged with murder in the 2023 death of Bernardo Moreno, 54, whose body was found burning near a freeway, according to reports at the time.
Prosecutors said that California Highway Patrol detectives “had developed information leading investigators to suspect human remains were on the property.” That prompted authorities to get a search warrant, and the San Diego police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation joined the search team.
As of Thursday afternoon, police tape still blocked off the cul-de-sac where the house sits, near an elementary school in the working-class Southcrest neighborhood. Some evidence trucks had driven away, but news crews and law enforcement officers remained at the scene.
The authorities did not say how many people the remains found at the home belonged to, nor did they say whether the case they were investigating had any connection to the murder charge Mr. Rhone currently faces. Mr. Rhone has an extensive criminal history that stretches back to the 1960s, according to federal court documents.
Footage captured by local news stations showed law enforcement vans and trucks lined up along the block, which ends at a scrubby hill below Highway 15. Blue tents marked with the California Highway Patrol logo were set up outside the house, and investigators, some in white suits, walked around the back yard and looked into a crawl space below the house.
The F.B.I.’s San Diego field office said in a statement that its Evidence Response Team had helped state and local officials at their request, and that the F.B.I. had brought a forensics dog to the scene.
San Diego prosecutors have accused Mr. Rhone of killing Mr. Moreno, 54, after their dogs got into a fight and Mr. Moreno stabbed Mr. Rhone’s dog to break them up, according to CBS News 8, a San Diego station. Mr. Moreno’s body was later found when California Highway Patrol officers responded to a brush fire burning next to a freeway in the South Bay section of San Diego, near the Mexican border.
Mr. Rhone has been charged with murder, attempted robbery, illegally taking and driving a vehicle and using someone else’s personal information in the case, according to Steve Walker, a spokesman for the San Diego district attorney’s office. If convicted, Mr. Rhone faces up to life in prison. His next court hearing in the murder case is set for later this month.
Court documents in the case and information about Mr. Rhone’s lawyer in that case were not immediately available on Thursday.
Mr. Rhone had been entangled with the law in the months leading up to and immediately after Mr. Moreno’s killing.
Emerson Wheat, a lawyer who represented Mr. Rhone in a federal gun possession case stemming from a June 2023 incident, said that federal authorities arrested Mr. Rhone in November of that year and he has remained in either federal or state custody since then.
In a court document filed in December 2024 related to that case, federal prosecutors said Mr. Rhone had racked up 33 criminal offenses from 1963 to 2021.
He had not been allowed to possess a gun since his first felony conviction in 1969, federal prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memorandum for the gun possession case. Nevertheless, they wrote, he had possessed a loaded handgun when San Diego police officers approached him in June 2023.
In the document, federal prosecutors recommended that he be sentenced to a little more than three years in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
But “on the mitigating side,” they wrote, Mr. Rhone, who was raised in Texas, “had a good childhood,” and had graduated from high school and earned college degrees, despite having been diagnosed with mental and emotional health issues. Prosecutors did not describe those diagnoses in more detail.
Mr. Wheat said that much of a lifetime spent in and out of incarceration had taken its toll on Mr. Rhone. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison in the gun case, which ended in September.
Mr. Rhone was transferred to state custody near the end of that sentence on charges that were connected to the murder of Mr. Moreno, according to Mr. Wheat.
Before his most recent incarceration, Mr. Rhone had long been connected to the home that investigators searched this week.
In 2017, Ernie Monia, a relative who at one point owned the home, was granted an elder abuse restraining order against Mr. Rhone. She died in 2020.
Antoinette Rhone, Ms. Monia’s daughter and Mr. Rhone’s niece, said on Thursday that she believed her uncle was being unfairly maligned and that he deserves to be heard in court.
Mr. Rhone, she said, was like a second father to her.
“He took care of everything when I went to high school and college,” she said. “He’s a good person. Whatever else is going on, I don’t know.”
The authorities said the investigation at Mr. Rhone’s former home is continuing and asked anyone with information about his “potential involvement in additional crimes” to call the San Diego Police Department.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research and Jennifer McEntee contributed reporting from San Diego.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
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