Hi! How are you today? I hope you're having a wonderful day. Today is Monday, which means it's murder, mystery, and makeup Monday!

Sala, sala, sala, sala, sala, sala, sala, sala, sala!

If you are new here, hi! My name is Bailey Sarian, and on Mondays I sit down and I talk about a true crime story that's been heavy on my...

Noggin, and... did you my makeup at the same time?

If you're interested in true crime and you like makeup, I would suggest you hit that subscribe button, because I'm here for you on Mondays!

But other than that, I hope you have a happy holiday and a happy and safe new year, too. The end, goodbye. Just kidding.

But yeah, I hope you have a happy and safe holiday. I can't believe this year is done so. Wow.

Okay, but today's story is not great, per usual, and really sad. So, here goes that. So let's paint the picture.

It's Christmas Eve 2008 in Covena, California. Now, Covena, California, if you don't know, is like a little suburb in Los Angeles County, and it's...

a suburb, that's really what you could say about it. It's about 20 miles east of downtown LA, and today, at least, it has around 50,000 people in its like seven square miles area.

So in this suburb is where the Ortega family was having their yearly Christmas Eve get together at home of Jose and Alice Ortega.

Now, the Ortegas were said to be like the all-American... just live in the all-American dream. Jose, who the family called Papa Joe, his parents were immigrants, and he was like the first generation of his family to be born here.

And I mean, he had done really well for himself and his family. In 2008, he retired, and he was living happily as a retired man, but his son...

I mean, because he was running his own business for a while, and his son ended up taking over, and one of them... one of his sons ended up expanding the business when Joe retired.

What I'm getting at is a family business. Joe's family is all up in it, still running it. Keeping it going, and Joe is retired.

So, Joe and his wife, Alice, they invited the whole family over for Christmas Eve, and they did this every year. So it was like... just what they did. Great.

So the house was packed. It had all of Joe and Alice's children, their wives and husbands, their grandchildren, and the house to me was just filled with everybody.

There had to be at least 25 people inside the home, and they're just having a great time, you know? Christmas Eve. Great.

Most of the adults were in the living room, and they were playing poker, which was like a family tradition. When they all got together on Christmas Eve, they always played poker.

And then other members of the family were like sitting around in the living room, chatting, having a cocoa, whatever.

And then there's like kids scattered around the house, somewhere in the backyard playing. And yeah, just everyone is everywhere.

You get it. If you have a big family, everyone is everywhere. Well, around 11.30 at night, some of the family decided, you know, it's kind of late. Maybe we should start to head home.

...