Juan Carlos Anaya Hernandez was an aspiring musician who serenaded his neighbors outside the Alexandria apartment complex where his family settled after fleeing violence in <\/b>El Salvador.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n His stepfather, Adrian de Jesus Rivera Guzman, was the rock of the family \u2014 working as a landscaping contractor to pay for rent, phone bills and groceries, lending a hand to neighbors in need, and having fun appearing on his wife and stepson\u2019s TikTok videos.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Anaya Hernandez, 24, and Rivera Guzman, 48, were at work performing landscaping services when they were fatally shot around 7:30 a.m.<\/a> on July 16. Police have linked the shootings to a burglary at the Assembly Alexandria apartments and said the landscapers were \u201cinnocent bystanders.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThey had just left. I walked with my husband for two blocks, with his breakfast, some bread in a bag,\u201d said Laura Hernandez, the wife and mother of the victims. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t even 20 minutes; it was about 15 minutes when we got the call that he was on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Police have revealed few details of what transpired, but the shooting has reverberated throughout Northern Virginia. The man police named as a suspect in the case \u2014 27-year-old Francis Deonte Rose \u2014 had been released from law enforcement custody in neighboring Arlington County several months earlier after prosecutors dropped drug and weapons charges against him. The county\u2019s police union and the Virginia Republican Party criticized the Democratic commonwealth\u2019s attorney over the move \u2014 though it came after a judge suppressed evidence in the case, ruling that police had illegally searched Rose\u2019s bag.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Police: Two men slain in Alexandria were bystanders doing landscaping<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Rose has not been charged in the Alexandria slayings and is detained on charges including burglary and illegally entering a building. The Alexandria commonwealth attorney, Bryan Porter, said Thursday that further charges are not expected to be filed in the coming days. An attorney listed for Rose in court records for the illegal-entry charge, Taso R. Saunders, did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Rivera Guzman told his wife that two men had approached him about 2:30 p.m. the day before the shooting, she said, asking if he was the owner of the landscaping trucks and equipment stationed outside the apartments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It seemed suspicious, Hernandez said, but \u201cthey thought it wasn\u2019t about them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t have any reason to fear them, because we didn\u2019t have problems and we didn\u2019t have money,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Police in D.C. and Arlington separately have charged <\/b>Rose with carrying firearms illegally in the past, court records show. Rose was charged in 2019 for unlawful possession of a loaded, .45-caliber handgun that D.C. police recovered after he threw it to the ground during a foot chase. Rose pleaded guilty, but court records show he has not appeared for recent probation hearings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In October <\/b>2020, Rose was charged in Arlington County for unlawfully possessing a firearm with intent to distribute heroin, for possessing the gun as a convicted nonviolent offender, possessing cocaine and possessing fentanyl with intent to distribute it. A little less than a year and a half later, the case would be dropped.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Court records show Rose <\/b>was a passenger in a car that Arlington County <\/b>police had pulled over because the registered owner had a suspended license. Police smelled marijuana and ordered the driver and Rose to exit the vehicle, according to court records.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Rose was wearing a Louis Vuitton cross-body bag strapped over his shoulder, and police told him to leave it in the car, according to a court transcript. Police found a loaded Glock handgun inside the bag <\/b>and cocaine and fentanyl in his pockets, according to court records.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Rose was held in jail after he was charged. But in February, a judge in Arlington County ruled that the search that turned up the gun and drugs was unconstitutional. His defense attorney in that case, Molly Newton, successfully argued that police were not legally empowered to search the bag because it was \u201cappended\u201d to Rose, citing a 2002 decision<\/a> by the Virginia Court of Appeals. Without probable cause to search anything but the car, the drugs in Rose\u2019s pockets and the gun in his cross-body bag could not be admitted as evidence in court, Newton argued.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Arlington County Circuit Judge William T. Newman Jr. suppressed the evidence from the search, and noted he had a similar Louis Vuitton bag. Prosecutors immediately moved to drop the charges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMaybe it was a small crime he was guilty of, but now there are victims,\u201d Hernandez said of Rose. \u201cI know that if he\u2019s in prison, my son and husband, they won\u2019t come back. They\u2019re gone forever. And even if it\u2019s hard for me to believe, that\u2019s how things are. I accept it. But this man can\u2019t get out. He can\u2019t get out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n After Anaya Hernandez and Rivera Guzman were shot and killed, a Twitter account managed by the Virginia Republican Party blamed Arlington Commonwealth Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D). \u201cHad she done her job, two people would be alive today,\u201d the tweet said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Dehghani-Tafti responded on Twitter, calling the landscapers\u2019 deaths a tragedy and the accusation from the Virginia GOP \u201can outrageous and irresponsible lie.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe facts: we charged the defendant & obtained a grand jury indictment; we asked he be denied bond; he was held for 2 years pre trial; he moved to suppress the evidence; the court agreed, finding the police search violated the 4th amendment,\u201d she tweeted last month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Arlington Coalition of Police in a news release criticized Dehghani-Tafti\u2019s response and said she should have appealed Newman\u2019s ruling or instituted training so that similar issues with police searches did not recur.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n An Arlington County police officer testified at the hearing in February that officers in his department were trained to ask people to leave their bags inside any vehicle to be searched, \u201cfor officer safety reasons.\u201d Asked whether Arlington police trained officers this way, a spokeswoman for the department, Ashley Savage, referred to the written policy for searches and seizures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSearches and seizures effected by officers shall be conducted reasonably and in accordance with the Fourth Amendment, applicable state law, and relevant case law, taking into account the totality of the circumstances of an incident in order to ensure an equitable and effective criminal justice process,\u201d the police directive<\/a> says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIn the interest of the safety of everyone on scene, the passenger was separated from the bag,\u201d Savage said of Rose\u2019s search in 2020, adding that the police\u2019s actions \u201cwere reasonable and prudent based on the information known at the time, however, we respect the ruling of Arlington County Circuit Court Chief Judge William Newman.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n After Rose was released by Arlington authorities, another judge scheduled hearings to review Rose\u2019s probation for his 2019 conviction for unlawful possession of a handgun in D.C. Prosecutors in D.C. filed a request in May to revoke or modify Rose\u2019s probation, court records show. D.C. Superior Court Judge Michael Ryan scheduled a hearing to review Rose\u2019s probation in June, but he failed to appear and \u201chas been a loss of contact,\u201d court records show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n An attorney for Rose told a D.C. court in April that Rose had <\/b>\u201cenrolled himself in a suboxone clinic in Arlington.\u201d Court records in D.C. show that a judge shortened Rose\u2019s sentence in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. <\/b>Rose\u2019s listed address in the records was in Alexandria \u2014 on the same block where Anaya Hernandez and Rivera Guzman were shot and killed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hernandez said death had stalked her <\/b>family for years, even before arriving in the United States in 2018.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Her eldest son was killed in El Salvador, which the family then left due to rampant gang violence, she said. A second son was killed in Guatemala after Hernandez ignored threats that she should pay \u201crent\u201d to the local gang that controlled the turf where she had set up her business, she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Rivera Guzman, her husband of 18 years, had adopted her boys and raised them from a young age, she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, her surviving son, Jeremias Ezequiel Anaya Hernandez, worries how the family will make ends meet. His brother, Juan Carlos, he said, supported their mother and was taking steps to establish his new life in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe said, \u2018I want to do everything in order. First, my house, my stuff. Then, God willing, my wife and my family,\u2019\u201d Anaya Hernandez said. \u201cThose were his dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n