Watkins

FACTS

The following factual summary is based on testimony presented at Watkins’s preliminary hearing. On the morning of May 8, 2019, two friends parked their cars in a beach parking lot in Dana Point so they could go surfing. One of the men locked his vehicle and placed his car keys in the center console of the other’s Lexus. The second man locked his vehicle and hid the keys inside its bumper. It is unclear from the record what time the two friends left their cars.

2 When the two men returned to their cars later that morning, they found their keys were where they had left them, but their wallets and cellphones were missing. They called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to report the burglary. An investigator arrived on the scene at about 12:15 p.m. to interview the victims. The investigator did not attempt to gather fingerprints from the car keys or vehicles, nor did he attempt to obtain video surveillance footage of the parking lot. Later that afternoon, two men used the victims’ credit cards to purchase laptops from a Best Buy in West Covina in Los Angeles County. The store’s surveillance video footage showed the first man buying a laptop at 1:05 p.m. and the second man…