At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a college student disappeared from his place of work. For investigators in Los Angeles County, manipulated security footage might have held the clues as to who killed Juan Hernandez and who made him disappear. 

His mother, Yajaira Hernandez, spoke with Buried in the Backyard — airing Saturdays at 8/7c on Oxygen — about life as a mom to three sons. The family of four lived together and shared a love of running marathons, bonding as a family “connected.”

“I love all my three kids, and we all have a great bond, but the bond that Juan and I had was different,” said the mother. “He was always closer to me.”

Who was Juan Hernandez?

Juan Hernandez, 21, was Yajaira Hernandez’s middle son, a young man with “hopes and dreams” of one day being an electrical engineer after completing his courses at El Camino College in Los Angeles County. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, the beloved son found work at a local marijuana dispensary, working the 3:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. shift just 20 minutes from home, according to his mother. 

“It wasn’t an ideal job; I wasn’t the happiest of moms, but he had to work,” she said. “He was trying to save up for school, so all I could do was support him.”

Yajaira Hernandez last saw Juan Hernandez at around 2:00 p.m. on September 22, 2020, as he readied to go to work, taking his mother’s car to get there. He texted “I’ll see you soon” at 10:00 p.m., as he usually did after work, though the mother fell asleep soon after. 

The next morning, there was no sign of the college student. 

“I think the world stopped for me in that moment,” said the grieving mother. “He’d never not come home, never leave me stranded. We share locations on our cell phones; his location is off. This is not normal.”

When authorities told Yajaira Hernandez she had to wait 72 hours to file an official missing persons report, the mother hit the ground running to conduct her own review. 

A mother’s search for Juan Hernandez

Yajaira Hernandez visited the dispensary and found a security guard who knew the shop’s manager, later identified as Ethan Astaphan, though then only known as “E.” Through the guard, the mother got Astaphan on the phone, and she requested access to the security cameras posted throughout the business. 

Astaphan told her they were live-feed only and, therefore, would be of no use in her ongoing searches for her son. 

Yajaira Hernandez took her plight to social media, resulting in thousands of shares and, most importantly, attention from the LAPD, namely Detectives Daniel Jaramillo and Jennifer Hammer.

Reports of Juan Hernandez’s captivity

In the days following Juan Hernandez’s disappearance, Yajaira Hernandez received ransom notes by text from multiple numbers. The purported kidnappers demanded $7,000 in exchange for Juan Hernandez’s safe return. 

Detectives Jaramillo and Hammer recognized “a potential that his life could be in danger,” prompting them to obtain warrants to search Juan Hernandez’s phone, bank, and social media records. 

As digital investigations continued into the possible ransom, Det. Hammer told Buried in the Backyard that it was “concerning and suspicious” that Juan Hernandez’s phone was turned off near the dispensary soon after his last shift ended. Days later, their most prominent lead came when Yajaira Hernandez’s missing vehicle popped up out of the blue.

“Ms. Hernandez’s car was found two to three miles from the dispensary, and that area, where it was located, it’s a very high crime, prostitution, gang area,” said Jaramillo. “It’s a rougher part of town.”

But searches of the car yielded nothing, and the same went for the purported ransom notes to Yajaira Hernandez’s phone. Police said digital records proved the messages were part of an elaborate extortion scheme, in which scammers from other continents obtained her phone number from missing poster ads and attempted to take the frantic mother’s money. 

Yajaira Hernandez was no closer to finding her son. 

On Sept. 29, 2020, authorities used a search warrant to investigate the dispensary. They collected the security footage, which, contrary to what Astaphan claimed to Yajaira Hernandez, was not at all live-feed only. 

“There’s no video before September 22nd; it starts on the 23rd,” Hammer said. “Obviously, that’s suspicious. Why is there no video before the 22nd?”

Surveillance footage offers new leads

On the morning of Sept. 23, security footage showed three people cleaning the shop’s floor, two of which included Astaphan and dispensary owner Weijia “James” Peng, as identified by the security guard. 

The third person was later identified as Peng’s girlfriend, Sonita Heng.

But by then, Peng had flown from LAX airport to Turkey, and detectives had to build their case. They enlisted the help of the Glendale Police Department’s crime lab, since they had the technology to recover the lost surveillance footage. 

“There were over one million files that were recovered, but only one to two frames from one clip captured September 22, when Juan went missing, just less than a second of movement,” crime lab Detective Juan Giraldo told Buried in the Backyard. 

According to Giraldo, the camera pointing to the dispensary’s display case showed someone resembling Juan Hernandez “being taken down to the ground” by two individuals, soon after the missing man’s shift ended. He said he felt “confident” the clip had been purposefully deleted from the security system. 

But there was no way of telling whether Juan Hernandez was dead in the video.

“While Ethan Astaphan is choking Juan Hernandez, you see James Peng lean down, and there’s something weird in his hand,” said Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Ethan Milius. 

Investigators theorized it could have been a cell phone. 

Detectives investigate Astaphan, Peng, and Heng

In October 2020, detectives executed search warrants for phones belonging to Ethan Astaphan, James Peng, and Sonita Heng. Results returned the following month painted a clear picture of their movements on the night of Juan Hernandez’s disappearance. 

Records showed them heading to the Mojave Desert, where the odds of narrowing in on a location within a 10-mile radius were “minimal to zero,” Det. Jaramillo said.  

Searches in the vast desert began on November 13, 2020, focusing on a grid between two cell phone towers. The search widened the next day, comprising dozens of investigators, ATV, and helicopter crews. Search and rescue dogs from San Bernardino County helped home in on the nearly skeletal remains of Juan Hernandez, close to a fallen barbed wire fence and partially buried in the sand. 

Two months had passed since Juan Hernandez vanished, and animals had gotten to the decomposed remains. 

“It destroyed us,” said the victim’s mother. “As individuals, and it destroyed us as a family.”

Detectives make arrests

On Nov. 19, 2020, following the discovery of Juan Hernandez’s body, investigators secured arrest warrants for Astaphan and Heng. James Peng, however, was still in Turkey. 

According to Prosecutor Habib Balian, a search through Astaphan’s phone messages offered “a glimpse into the plan that he and James Peng had been formulating.” 

“In their minds, they believed that Juan was stealing from them,” Balian told Buried in the Backyard. 

Police, however, said there was no evidence to support that any theft had taken place. 

On December 16, 2020, Sonita Heng — through her attorney — requested a sit-down with detectives, agreeing to talk in exchange for a lighter conviction. In a recorded interview obtained by Buried in the Backyard, Heng tearfully said she feared for her life, which was why she went along with the men’s devious plans. 

Heng told detectives that Peng — her boyfriend — used a syringe to inject Hernandez with ketamine, which explained the unknown object seen in the suspect’s hand during the Sept. 22 attack. 

She said Peng injected more after Hernandez had died during the two-and-a-half-hour drive to the desert. 

“He injected [it] in Juan’s eyeball,” Heng cried on tape. “Ethan was making fun of it. He said, ‘I was trying to inject it into his eyeball to see if his eyeball changed.’” 

When Hernandez was found in the desert, a San Bernardino County coroner was unable to determine the cause of death. However, with Heng’s information, a reexamination confirmed the presence of ketamine in Hernandez’s toxicology, a drug for which testing had not been conducted initially. 

The report was later amended to show Hernandez died from both strangulation and ketamine toxicity, according to Hammer.

Authorities believed Peng was still in Turkey, awaiting the right time to enter China. It would take two years to have him arrested and extradited to the United States to face a judge, with the help of Turkish authorities and the U.S. Marshals. 

The murder trial of Astaphan and Peng

The trial began on February 9, 2024, when the court heard about the men killing Hernandez, and Heng helping them try to cover up their crimes. 

“Ethan got into Juan’s car and he left it in a high-prostitution area,” Det. Hammer said. “The next day, they took Juan’s belongings, went to Newport Beach, and they burned Juan’s items.”

It took a jury only a few hours to find Astaphan and Peng guilty of first-degree murder. 

Astaphan is presently serving a 25-to-life sentence; Peng is currently serving a 26-to-life sentence, according to prison records reviewed by Oxygen. 

For her testimony and cooperation, Sonita Heng was sentenced to probation and spent 112 days behind bars. 

“We remember Juan being kind and always being there for his loved ones,” Yajaira Hernandez said. “We honor his life by trying to be better because [these] individuals took his body. But his spirit, and his love, all of that remains in my heart.”

Don’t miss all-new episodes of Buried in the Backyard airing Saturdays at 8/7c on Oxygen.