“Will you kill my mother? Will you kill me?”
These are the first words that I heard from her 7 -year -old daughter, after three gunmen disabled their door in San Diego County, California, on November 21, 2000.
Rene says that she lost her daughter after the infiltrators threw him on the floor and tied them to an adhesive tape. When she finally managed to search, Berra saw “a face down, a pistol on her head.”
The militants took their time to explain the reason they were there. They told her that they followed her for several months.
“This was the thing they were doing in the mind,” Rene said, “We know everything about you,” including the fact that she was the director of a branch in a local bank.
Finally, René’s leader told what they wanted.
She remembers them, tell her: “You will steal the bank for us.” “Or you will die, your daughter will go first.”
“48 hours”, Trissy Smith, takes us in this extraordinary situation in “kidnapping Michel and Breia Rene.” Now flow to Paramount+.
Throughout the night, Rene said she heard the delicious reader talking to a female voice on a continuing device. The woman described it as “one money”, and it was “the second money.”
The next morning, Rene and her colleague in the room and Barrei were linked to dynamite. Rene said that they told her that she could explode within a 10 -miles if she takes one wrong step. BREA will be placed in a wardrobe while RENE went to the bank – with the parking leader at the back of her car. By the time the bank opened at 9 am, Rene came out with a bag of coarse fabric full of $ 360,000.
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Once the gunman took off with criticism, René raced home, and she was not sure what she would find as soon as she got there.
“I don’t know if the land will be there,” Rene remembers thinking. “I don’t know if it is alive when I got there.”
When I finally arrived, the gunmen went, and Berra was still in the cabinet where René left her.
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The wife of the wife forgot to remove the dynamite from the back of Rene. After examining it, the grenade band discovered that it was fake. Tom Manning, the prosecutor at the office of San Diego County Lawyer, told “48 hours” that he was only handles from the polished handles that were cut, drawn and recorded together to look like dynamite.
During the hostage situation for 14 hours, René had realized the eyes of the resonance leader because he was asking as a customer in the bank earlier that day, and he had left behind a work card before his companion moved him.
Rene said: “My mind was, my God, do not let him know that you know.”
It would help investigators break the case.
“Through this card, they started the investigation,” Rene said.
The work card has contained the real suspect, Christopher Bater. The FBI soon discovered that Bater was a convicted criminal with a history that steals it. Through monitoring, they found Bater living in a house with his fiancée Lisa Ramirez, the same woman who came with him to the bank. When Pater and Ramirez were arrested 10 days after a traffic station, investigators found material evidence linking them to the crime, including the BB pistol that matches one of the rifles that Rene described, skiing with intermittent eye holes, René credit cards, and money tapes from the bank.
At home, the investigators found “all ingredients to make a fake bomb,” said Maning, such as cutting cut from the dreamer handle, and boxes of red spray coating, including one with the Ramirez imprint on it. A bitler fingerprint will be found later on the fake dynamite itself.
“It was crazy, and I have never seen a lot of material evidence that left at the crime scene,” said Manning.
Batrler denied everything to the police and tried to protect Ramirez. But during her interview, Ramirez admitted the authorities who participated in the plot, and that she was the female voice on the wireless integrity. She even got the credit for the use of fake dynamite and kidnapping the bank manager. The investigators also told that the money had divided three ways among the suspects, but its share was stolen and Bitar. But during that interview, Ramirez also claimed that Rene was.
“We got out of this thinking,” said Manning. Is it possible for Michelle to participate? ”
But in the end, Manning said, he knew that Rene was innocent.
“The first time she met, she had a wild with her,” said Manning. And … I saw this bond and the relationship. When I left, I went, “she did not participate in this. “
There was also all the evidence to install it in the René account. The other two suspects, Christopher Hugins and Robert Ortiz, gave full confessions, not involved.
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In June 2002, Bater and Ramirez will be tried together in the first two experiences.
“There was a lot of evidence,” Rene said. “There was no way I thought this trial would have become something but …
Manning said the DA office was confident that Ramirez’s main statements about her participation would allow the introduction of evidence.
Even Ramirez Herb Weston’s lawyer admitted that he did not look good for his client – she admitted the camera. Weston Smith told that he believed that Ramirez was guilty when he got the case for the first time, and he brought the trial a call and rejoicing it.
“If they played this tape, saying that she was not involved will be difficult,” said Weston Smith.
But to surprise everyone, and Weston, because Ramirez’s statements were also involved in the co -defendant Batrir, the judge’s entire opposite ruling is unacceptable.
“We can now say that she is not involved,” Weston explained.
Without the Ramirez statement, the case was heavily dependent on René’s certificate. In court, the defense will attack its credibility, and even indicate that it was complicit in the bank robbery.
Rene said: “I was treated as if I was a criminal.”
“I got a very confrontation,” Manning recalls.
Weston told “48 hours” his strategy was “to overcome hell from the victim and refer to all the contradictions the victim says.”
He indicated that René was lying about getting to know the voice of Ramirez on the Walkie-Talkie on the night he was seized as hostages, noting that he was not in any FBI reports. But Riny insists that she told them, and Maning argued that Rene had selected the voice of Ramirez before taking the situation. But Weston argued that although his client had admitted that the sound was her salary, the jury did not know that.
“This is not the point,” Weston said. “For me, it was a great opening to attack [Renee’s] credibility.”
Weston said it is doubtful that Rene did not take the taste of the bait – the banks of the bills that can be tracked in the cellar of a bank thieves retain. Rene explained, however, that she will not seize the opportunity to kill her daughter, especially since the gunmen have issued instructions for her “no funny money.”
Perhaps worse than all of Linerie, Weston raises doubts in her mother’s instincts, and she wonders why she returned home, knowing that she was bound to dynamite can explode. But Manning said that Rene’s actions were completely logical, given pressure and pressure was René under robbery on the bank to save her daughter’s life.
While Weston cleared every decision made by Rene on that day, a lawyer chose to Berier her financial history, and even asked her about her sexual life.
“They were trying to draw me as an irresponsible person,” said Rene said.
“A terrible selfish mother … you will do anything for money,” she added.
According to Manning, “The defense was to make it from the perpetrator.”
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After the three -year -old Rene days of direct certificate and interrogation, Bitler took over the situation. He continued to protect Ramirez as I had in an interview with the police, but now he told a new complex story, as Rene was the surface mind in the bank’s robbery. He claimed that two of them had previously affected. He said they met in a grocery store, and that Rene had recruited him to steal the bank.
Manning admitted that it was a certificate of dropping the jaw, but she claimed that it was a lie and that the defense had not provided any evidence of Bater’s claims.
“If any of this is true, Michel threw a pulsate in his heart [police] An interview, “Manning said.
But despite the strange story, the defense seems to have done what they started to do. After trading for a period of five days, the jurisdiction of Betrler found a guilty of stealing and kidnapping land and their colleague in the room, but it was suspended 9-3 on the charges that involve the kidnapping of Rene.
Manning said that one of the jury was fully believed to be Bitler’s story, while the other two were not sure. Petrler is still receiving multiple sentences for all other charges, but Ramirez was walking a free woman. The jury found it not guilty of all charges.
“The mind is baffled”, Rene said. “The fact that her idea was to do it for a mother, a child, laugh and proud of it.”
“It was the best judgment I got in my life,” Weston said.
Although the other two suspects are easily sedan in their trial after a few months, Rene said she felt a review of the defense tactics.
“Is it fair to hit the victim?” Smith Weston asked.
“Oh, definitely, certainly,” Weston answered.
Manning said that the jury had erred in Ramirez. He believed that she was “very involved … the investigators continued to say … the brains of the outfit were.”
It will take two decades, but the truth will eventually come from an unlikely source.
In January 2020, when Christopher Bater became eligible for a conditional release under California’s laws, Manning saw an opportunity to ask about the story he told on the platform. Petler retreated his entire testimony, and he admitted that he was Riny had no relationship.
“It is time,” said Rene. “There was never a chance … I would have participated in anything like that.”
Bitler was refused to make the conditional release, but Rene was free.
“I can breathe … I can exhale, finally, after all these years,” she said.
Robert Ortiz gave the conditional release in January 2021.
Christopher Bater got the conditional release in December 2024.
Christopher Hugins gave a conditional release in March 2025.
