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Hello and welcome to true crime daily the podcast covering high profile and under the radar cases from across the country every week on your host and a Garcia we are recording this on July 7th.

2021 our guest today is Josh Ritter who's a former L.A. prosecutor and now works as a criminal defense attorney here in L.A. Josh welcome back gorgeous so thrilled you're here.

Hi Anna. Thank you so much for having me.

So we're just chatting before we started recording you say that pretty much everything's back to normal in the courts you're back you're back inside.

The courts are are back to being open I wouldn't say it's back to normal at least here in L.A. County they are having jury trials but everyone's still wearing masks.

Okay all right so then how much of a backlog do you think we have like at least a year or more it's huge it's huge it's going to be a title wave it's something that I've been speaking with some judges and everyone's dreading it because a lot of the public defenders haven't been waving time so there's a lot of people who.

There you know quote unquote last day of trial is going to hit as soon as they open things up.

Wow it's going to be interesting to see what happens.

Does that mean some people who are charged but maybe because they're not waving trial could actually walk.

I don't know if it's going to go that far I think you're going to see the DA's office scrambling to kind of give people offers so that they accept it because there's there's just going to be too many trials for them to handle.

Wow and we have a DA here in L.A. who has been widely criticized for not wanting to prosecute people so.

Should be very interesting it's going to be very interesting that deals are going to get even better than they were before.

Wow oh I don't like hearing that okay well let's see if you know eventually there might be some justice in these two cases that were going to talk about they are horrific.

One has me very upset as you can imagine because the victim in this case is an autistic boy and whenever a vulnerable special needs person is murdered.

It is even more egregious you cannot be more defenseless.

Alright so let's look at the cases we have a former Houston police sergeant who has been sentenced to 40 years for murdering his wife but first the mother a mother here in California has admitted to strangling to death her autistic son whose body was found in the Nevada desert.

35 year old Samantha marina Rodriguez was a reigned in Las Vegas a week ago on June 30th and charged with the murder of her seven year old son.

She appeared via video conference because that is still going on in a lot of courts right now especially from the jails.

K L A S TV reports that the judge denied her bond so here's what happened as far as we know it and has been told to us by prosecutors investigators and news reports on May 28th the body of an unidentified boy was found in mountain springs Nevada that's about 30 miles west of Las Vegas.

His body remained unidentified for a week they had no idea who this child was so authorities rather than just calling him John Doe which is obviously it's all very cold they named him little Zion and they took to the media and they asked people are you missing a child of about this age and they and all of a sudden all these tips started coming in from around the country hundreds of tips.

Now Josh's you know a lot of times these tips are not very helpful but sometimes they are and in this case the combination of tips and police work did help because there was a missing persons report out of San Jose California involving a seven year old boy.

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