An Apple Valley man has been arrested for the gruesome 2022 murder of a 16-year-old boy, officials announced Tuesday.
“After a tireless investigation, homicide detectives identified Antonio Rodriguez as the suspect responsible for the murder of Robert Schmidt Jr.,” the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said in a release.
The 26-year-old was booked for murder at the High Desert Detention Center on Monday, according to the department.
It was not immediately revealed whether Rodriguez knew Schmidt, but he will now be facing homicide charges nearly three years after the teen was found stabbed to death in a dirt field.
On Oct. 18, 2022, Schmidt’s brutalized body was found near a skatepark on the 13500 block of Navajo Road.
The boy’s mother, Elizabeth Schmidt, spoke with KTLA’s Shelby Nelson a few months after the murder.
She said she was working the graveyard shift the night before, on Oct. 17, and it wasn’t until the next morning that she learned her only son, the oldest of her four children, had never come home.
Elizabeth had dropped Schmidt and his best friend, Dre, off at the skatepark that evening. According to Dre, he’d left Schmidt that night with a friend at the Dollar General on Navajo Road, near the skatepark.
Elizabeth said she later went looking for her son and filed a police report.
“When we were driving by, we had seen the fire department pulling up on scene and them taping it off,” the grieving mother said. “In that moment, I knew that that was my son. I started putting everything together.”
Investigators looked through surveillance video and, at the time, said they believe there was some sort of struggle or altercation in the moments leading up to Schmidt being murdered, sometime between 9 and 10 p.m.
Elizabeth said maintenance workers from a nearby daycare center were the ones to find her dead son the next day.
“He was my everything. He was my only boy, he was awesome,” she said. “He was a kid who always looked out for others. We want answers. We’re hoping that one day, you know, somebody would come forward.”
Although details on the 26-year-old’s arrest remain limited, officials said that as of Tuesday, Rodriguez was being held without bail.
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