On Feb. 22 at about 3:35 p.m., the California Highway Patrol got a call about a speeding vehicle that had driven off the road into a field near Ward and Cotton roads near Los Banos, a rural area of farm fields and two-lane blacktops.

The CHP officer who arrived found David Mora, also known as David Fidel Mora-Rojas, 39, standing outside his 2013 Kia Rio, which was stuck in the mud on a cloudy, wet afternoon.

“Mr. Rojas had signs and symptoms of being under the influence of alcohol/drugs,” a CHP collision report on the investigation by Officer E. Alvarez says. “(An) altercation ensued where Mr. Rojas struck Officer Alvarez and he attempted to (gain) control of Mr. Rojas as he was resisting.”

Additional CHP officers and Merced County sheriff’s deputies responded, and Mora was arrested and charged with assaulting a peace officer and driving under the influence.

Before he was booked, he was taken for medical evaluation to Memorial Hospital in Los Banos, where he assaulted a hospital worker, the report says.

Mora subsequently was booked into the Merced County Jail at 1:14 a.m. on Feb. 23 on charges of DUI, battery on an officer and resisting arrest, according to jail booking records.

The next day, he bailed out, putting up $1,500 toward a $15,000 bail amount for a single charge of resisting arrest, a source said, and was ordered to return for his first court appearance on April 25.

Instead, five days later Mora walked into the Arden Arcade church where he was renting a room and opened fire with an AR-15 assault style rifle, killing his three young daughters and a chaperone who was supervising his court-ordered visitation before killing himself.

Deputies, who responded to the scene one minute after the 911 call was placed at 5:07 p.m., picked up 17 shell casings after the slayings.

How could this happen?

Mora had been the subject of a domestic violence restraining order since May 2021, one that prohibited him from possessing any weapons or ammunition, and had been arrested in Merced County on charges that could have led to a prison sentence of up to three years.

He had been ordered to undergo anger management classes, and had been accused in court papers of “mental instability” by his girlfriend, the mother of Samia, 13; Samantha, 10; and Samarah Mora Gutierrez, 9, who were all killed in the shooting at The Church in Sacramento on Wyda Way.

And he had been the subject of two previous calls for service from law enforcement in Sacramento County involving threats to harm himself, including one that resulted him in being placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold for at least 72 hours last April, Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee last week.

Questions persist

Now, sheriff’s detectives are left trying to determine whether the incident in Merced County should have led to Mora being detained longer and where and when he obtained the rifle used in the killings.

“We just don’t know,” the sheriff said in an interview in his office headquarters on Orange Grove Way. “It could have been new. It could have been from a friend of his. That’s obviously a big part of our investigation to see, not just for morbid curiosity but to see how could this happen, how could this have been prevented. ...

“A lot of people think, ‘Well, it’s a closed loop, the suspect’s dead, it’s an unfortunate tragedy but there’s no more investigation to do because it’s not a whodunit at this point.’

“That’s not true. There’s a lot of unanswered questions, and in this particular case we’re going to get all the answers that we can.”

So far, Jones said, detectives know Mora did not have any firearms registered to him, and that because of the domestic violence restraining order issued against him last May — which automatically prohibits possession of firearms or ammunition — Mora should not have been able to buy the rifle at any retail gun outlet.

“There’s no way,” Jones said. “They would have run him, they would have known he had a restraining order. And, more importantly, he knows he can’t buy or purchase a weapon, so he had to go to some other means to be able to procure the weapon.”

The weapon will be disassembled and inspected as detectives search for serial numbers or telltale clues as to where it came from, and Jones said there is no indication yet whether it was a “ghost gun” purchased on the black market.

But law enforcement sources say Mora would have had little difficulty obtaining one illegally, even with the restraining order in place, with one saying making such a purchase “is easier then buying a dime bag of meth.”

Mora placed on psychiatric hold

Little is known about Mora’s background. He did not appear to have a job and had been renting living space from the church after living with his girlfriend in an Arden Arcade home not far from it.

He was a native of Mexico who entered California on Dec. 17, 2018, the Associated Press reported, and had overstayed his visitor visa.

Merced County sheriff’s spokesman Daryl Allen told The Bee Friday that federal immigration authorities had asked to be notified when Mora was released but that sheriff’s officials did not comply because that would have violated state law.

Mora had no criminal history in Sacramento other than two calls to law enforcement about him last year.

The first came in April 2021. Someone called to report he was making threats about harming himself, Jones said.

“We responded to the church about the subject talking about harming himself or his wife,” the sheriff said. “Patrol responded and we placed him on a 5150 hold at that time.”

That hold allowed Mora to be held in a medical facility for 72 hours, “then it’s really up to the doctors to determine when he’s no longer a threat to himself,” Jones said.

Mora’s girlfriend was not present when deputies responded, the sheriff said, but a court filing she made after his 5150 hold said he was taken into custody on April 17, 2021, and held in a hospital for a week for “psychosis.” She also wrote that he had threatened and choked her in the past, and that he told her he would kill her if he ever discovered her cheating on him.

“Respondent has a history of being verbally and physically aggressive that has been ongoing for the past 10 years,” she wrote. “I have moved out the house with the children because I am afraid of respondent and concerned my safety and the safety of my children.”

The woman wrote that they argued over his demand that she continue her work selling tamales while she wanted to begin cleaning houses.

“When I would not agree to do what he wanted, he became very angry and verbally abusive in front of the children,” she wrote. ‘He called me a ‘piece of s---’ and said I was ‘worth less than a d---.’ He threw a ball at me.

“He grabbed my right arm and pushed me inside the home. He continued to be verbally abusive. He was acting crazy. He was yelling and saying he did not care if I called the police. I called my friend from church to pick me up.”

The woman added that her children were “scared and crying” and “my oldest child was biting her nails off.”

Fourth victim was supervising visit

Domestic violence calls account for about 5,700 of the sheriff’s 380,000 calls for service annually, with about 1,700 resulting in felony charges for domestic violence or other crimes, he said, and are the most volatile types of calls deputies respond to.

Mora faced no charges at the time and was not arrested.

“There were no crimes being committed,” Jones said.

But that call may have been what precipitated the mother of his three daughters seeking help from the Sacramento Regional Family Justice Center, where the woman went to pursue a domestic violence restraining order.

The woman, whom The Bee is not identifying because she is a victim of domestic violence, filed for the order on April 28 and obtained a restraining order through May 2026 that limited Mora’s access to the children to four-hour visits once a week under the supervision of someone approved by the court.

That person was a friend of the mother’s from The Church, Nathaniel Kong, a 59-year-old elder identified in papers as Nathaniel Alcon. Authorities identified him as the fourth person slain by Mora.

After the April 5150 hold, Sacramento law enforcement encountered Mora once again in September 2021, when Sacramento County park rangers responded to a report of an individual along the parkway who was injured, and Rojas was taken to the UC Davis Medical Center for treatment of what appeared to be self-inflicted wounds, the sheriff said.

Mora did not come to the attention of Sacramento law enforcement again until 5 p.m Monday, with reports of a shooting at the church. Deputies rushed in to try to save the victims, then processed the scene of the mass shooting after it was apparent everyone was dead.

Heartbreak spreads across capital region

The mass shooting shocked the community, especially at the girls’ schools — Bannon Creek elementary and Leroy Greene Academy charter school — where grief counseling was offered last week and teachers and students grieved. At The Church, a makeshift memorial of flowers, balloons and candles sprouted, and a GoFundMe page set up by relatives to defray funeral expenses for the girls had raised more than $65,000, twice its goal, by Friday morning. A Sacramento Kings player, who did not wish to be identified, also offered to cover the funeral expenses.

The Gutierrez family responded to the community response in a statement Friday, saying in part, “we would like to thank everyone for the love and support we have received this week. It has helped us greatly as we work to process the overwhelming sense of grief and loss we are experiencing.”

But the outpouring of support will do little to offset the horror of what happened inside the church. Jones is retiring after 33 years with the Sheriff’s Office this year to mount a bid for Congress. He went to the scene but did not go inside.

“I will tell you, from my perspective, that there are some crime scenes and some crime scene photos that I’ve seen as sheriff that you never get rid of,” he said. “I mean, they stay with you forever. You could close your eyes and see them as vividly as when you saw them for the first time.”

He didn’t enter “because I had no business being in there, but more importantly I did not want to because I did not want to add to that list.”

Jones added: “I can’t even imagine the burden it places on the officers that are there. And then once they clear that call they have to go answer the next call for service. ...

“And then they go home and, hopefully, talk to their wives, hug their kids and go back to work the next day.”

This story was originally published March 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.