Background: The Summit County Justice Center in East Basin, Utah (Google Maps). Inset: Francisco Santos-Morales (Summit County Sheriff”s Office).
A Utah man and his girlfriend were arrested after her husband’s body was found on the side of a rural road last month.
Francisco Santos-Morales, 31, and Reina Chavez Sandobal, 41, were both charged with desecration of a dead body and obstruction of justice after Sandobal’s husband was found dead on March 26. According to a press release from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, the dead man was discovered near Brown’s Canyon Road in Utah’s Summit County and “quickly identified.” His identity led police to Sandobal, who was arrested on April 1.
Santos-Morales was taken into custody two days later, and police said the two soon started pointing the finger at each other.
According to an arrest report obtained by local NPR outlet KPCW, Sandobal and Santos-Morales were in a romantic relationship when she told him on March 25 that her husband, who was not named, was abusing her. Police said Sandobal told them that Santos-Morales killed her husband the next day.
However, when police spoke to Santos-Morales, he told them that it was Sandobal who allegedly “fatally struck” her husband.
Sandobal allegedly told police that she and Santos-Morales both loaded her husband’s body into a Honda Civic and dumped him on the side of the road. Police said she told them that they could find the hammer that was used to kill her husband as well as a blood-soaked blanket in her apartment.
Police said an autopsy determined the man’s cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head. The manner of death was listed as homicide.
Both Sandobal and Santos-Morales were charged with desecration of a dead body and obstruction of justice. Neither of them was charged in connection with the man’s death. Their next court dates were not publicly available.
