Before ex-Yakima Police Department officer Elias Huizar allegedly killed a woman and teenage girl with whom he had children and fled with his 1-year-old son, he faced at least two criminal investigations into his relationships with minors, records show.
Huizar’s divorce from the mother of his two older children spun out over the past two years, records show, and led to multiple 911 calls. One fight took place in 2021 at Wiley Elementary School where Huizar and his father-in-law argued so heatedly the principal had to separate them and call the police.
A year later, Huizar sailed cleanly through a background check, according to the Richland School District, and he got a substitute teaching job within the same district as Wiley. On Monday, he shot and killed ex-wife Amber Rodriguez on the school’s grounds.
Records obtained by OPB offer new insight about Huizar’s past and the events that led to his ex-wife’s death and the death of his 17-year-old girlfriend, Angelica Santos, before he took his own life near Eugene, Oregon.
The documents include a 2019 investigation conducted by the Washington state attorney general’s office, which showed Huizar first met Santos — the eventual mother of his youngest son — when she was 11 years old.
This image provided by the West Richland Police Department shows Elias Huizar. Huizar, a former Washington state police officer, was on the run Tuesday, April 23, 2024, after killing two people, including his ex-wife, who had recently obtained a protection order against him, authorities said.
Courtesy of the West Richland Police Department
Huizar was a school resource officer at Washington Middle School in 2019, where Santos was a sixth grade student. But state investigators at the time were unable to confirm the two had a sexual relationship, even as claims from the child surfaced.
During a second investigation two years later, police suspected the relationship with his ex-wife started while she was a minor, too.
While neither investigation led to criminal charges, they reveal police officials were aware of suspicions surrounding Huizar’s relationships with minors who he later had children with.
Despite the criminal investigations, the Richland School District has said it was unaware of any red flags when it hired Huizar in 2022. District officials said the hiring process includes fingerprinting and a criminal background check through the Washington State Police and the FBI.
“No past investigations or allegations appeared in Mr. Huziar’s background checks before he was hired and nothing was disclosed by Mr. Huizar,” district spokesperson Shawna Dinh wrote. “It is the expectation for individuals who apply for employment with RSD to be forthcoming and truthful in their applications.”
The criminal investigations are public and available through a records request, but it’s unclear if Richland School District or the law enforcement agencies requested them from the state.
The district also did not respond to questions about whether it contacted the city of Yakima, Huizar’s employer while he worked as a school resource officer, for a reference check or attempted to obtain a copy of his employment file.
Investigated by the state
In March 2019, rumors began to swirl among the students of Washington Middle School. A group of them eventually went to a school administrator’s office to share their concerns.
Santos — a sixth grader at the time — had been telling friends and posting to Snapchat that she was in a relationship with Huizar, the school’s resource officer and an employee of the Yakima Police Department.
Santos told some of them that she had sex with him at school and would spend time at this house.
Huizar’s supervisors at the Yakima Police Department stated in memos that they first heard the rumor in May. They quickly deferred to the Washington state attorney general’s office, and asked the state to investigate the claims. The investigation lasted nine days.
Senior investigator Bradley Graham obtained screenshots of Snapchat conversations from Santos’ friends where she made the claims.
“I kinda wants to slept (sic) with him but I don’t want to get pregnant,” she wrote to a classmate on the social media app.
The girl had also said that Huizar would take her to school, restaurants and his home.
State investigators never interviewed Huizar. Speaking through his attorney, he declined to give a statement related to the allegations. Graham wrote in his report that Huizar’s attorney agreed to speak to his client, but did not return a phone call the next day.
Graham then completed his investigation after speaking with the school’s leadership, Santos’ grandmother, with whom she lived, her mentor and her pastor. Eleven students submitted handwritten statements about what they had heard, according to the records.
Most of the interviewees professed that Santos had a history of fabricating stories. Some of her classmates doubted the rumor was true. The youth director of Grace of Christ Presbyterian Church relayed a story about Santos telling a tale at church that she had a son, prompting another person at the church to say “she does that.”
When Graham asked Santos’ grandmother about whether her granddaughter spent time with Huizar, she dismissed it. She said Santos would follow him around at school, but denied they ever saw each other outside of school.
Santos later denied she had any relationship with Huizar. In an interview with Graham, she said other girls made up the rumors to “cause drama.” When Graham asked about the Snapchat screenshots, Santos said she didn’t have the account’s password anymore and denied sending them.
Graham, in concluding his investigation, wrote the handful of interviews yielded nothing to corroborate that Huizar had an inappropriate relationship with the student.
“No one identified has reported any behaviors by Huizar that were considered concerning regarding sexual contact with minors,” Graham wrote.
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office did not respond to written questions from OPB.
Though charges were not filed, Huizar did violate Yakima Police Department policies during the inquiry. A separate internal investigation found that he knew about the rumors and did not report it. Yakima Police Chief Matthew Murray said it was months before the police department heard about the sexual abuse rumors at the middle school.
“He has an obligation, so does the principal, under state law as a mandatory reporter to report an allegation of sex assault by a child, even if he’s the suspect,” Murray said. “And so that’s what I disciplined him for.”
Murray, in an interview with OPB, said his office slapped Huizar with a policy violation — or, at least intended to. Murray said he wrote up a reprimand but didn’t complete it in the time frame required under the department’s contract with the union.
“Now you’re gonna find out how transparent I am,” Murray said. “My office was brand new, and we had a brand new staff, and we failed to get that in under the deadline. So, he never actually even got that discipline. Because we missed the deadline … That’s my fault. That rests on me.”
After the 2019 criminal investigation, Murray removed Huizar from Washington Middle School. But he was still allowed to work as a Yakima Police school resource officer.
“I wouldn’t let him go back to that middle school because that wouldn’t make any sense,” Murray said. “It’s also difficult for me to say you can’t be an SRO when we had unfounded allegations of sex crime. So I put him in a different school.”
That school was Franklin Middle School. The principals there would later go on to call Huizar a “very good” and “excellent” substitute teacher for the Richland School District.
‘Messy divorce’
In 2021, Huizar found himself in Richland, Washington, standing outside Wiley Elementary School. Video showed him taking off his jacket, balling his fists, and gesturing angrily at his father-in-law. The dispute was detailed in another internal affairs investigation launched in spring 2021.
The dispute became so heated that Principal Paul Chartrand stepped in between the two men. He then called 911, beckoning at least three squad cars to the scene.
Huizar and his wife, Amber Rodriguez, had been in the process of separating. Their argument at Wiley Elementary centered on who had custody that evening of one of their children, who was attending the school.
By then, police officers in Richland had become well acquainted with Huizar. On March 10, 2021, he had called 911 to accuse Rodriguez of forging medical documents. On March 19, he accused a family member of sending inappropriate text messages to a minor.
Then, on April 7, Huizar accused his father-in-law of threatening to shoot him.
The spate of police responses led the West Richland Police Department to alert Huizar’s supervisors at the Yakima Police Department, records show. Murray ordered another internal investigation.
But, according to Murray, Huizar was on paid leave. Murray declined to elaborate to OPB what reason Huizar had to take a leave, but compared it to when a person seeks medical leave after a surgery.
While Huizar remained on leave, internal affairs investigators could not interview him, according to Murray. They did however interview a handful of witnesses to the incidents, including his estranged wife, his father-in-law, school staff, and a small handful of West Richland Police Department officers.
“It is without question that Huizar and (his wife) are engaged in what can only be described as a messy divorce,” Yakima Police Lt. Chad Janis, the lead investigator, wrote in a nearly 30-page report.
Janis interviewed Huizar in October 2021, records show. Huizar quickly faced a trio of policy violations. Investigators said the run of incidents amounted to domestic violence concerns as defined under Washington law, which Huizar should have reported to his supervisors.
Huizar also neglected to tell his supervisors at the Yakima Police Department that he had moved to Richland. Huizar said he did so to stay close to his wife and children. His father-in-law said their side of the family did not welcome the move.
Rodriguez had “put her foot down and told Huizar it was over and not to waste his money buying a house near her,” the father-in-law told investigators.
In closing their internal investigation, Janis noted that despite the three internal policies broken, nothing currently under their investigation amounted to a crime.
But they did become suspicious. After interviewing Rodriguez, they learned that she was 17 years old when she met Huizar, who was 24 at that time. He was her wrestling coach, Rodriguez’s father told investigators.
The revelation prompted them to ask the neighboring police department in Union Gap, Washington, to investigate the allegations. However, a detective found that Huizar’s ex-wife didn’t want to face retaliation from Huizar if he was criminally charged.
“She expressed what appeared to be a genuine concern about Huizar being arrested and what that would do to her safety,” Union Gap Police Detective Curis Santucci wrote in a summary of that investigation. “She mentioned often that Huizar is not of sound mind, has told her he hears voices, was short tempered and controlling of her actions.”
Before the investigation closed, Huizar quit the Yakima Police Department. His last day was Feb.14, 2022.
By then he was already well on his way to a new job as a substitute teacher at Richland School District, according to public statements made by district officials.
Violence erupts
On Monday, police responded to a fatal shooting at Wiley Elementary. Huizar shot and killed Rodriguez on the school grounds.
Huizar was facing a pair of new criminal charges at the time of the killing. After a drunken night, Santos, now 17, accused him of sexually assaulting one of her 16-year-old friends.
After killing Rodriguez, Huizar briefly disappeared. Investigators found Santos dead in Huizar’s home and their 1-year-old son missing. Late Monday, the Oregon State Police issued an AMBER Alert at the request of the Washington State Patrol.
On Tuesday, troopers with the Oregon State Police spotted Huizar on Interstate 5 near Eugene. After Huizer fled a traffic stop, officers chased him for about 25 miles and exchanged gunfire.
Before troopers could place him in custody, Huizar turned a gun on himself. His son was unharmed.
A bunch of flowers Tuesday afternoon lay near the sign for William Wiley Elementary School in West Richland. Students returned to class on Wednesday morning with therapy dogs and counselors.
Anna King / NW News Network
After obtaining records documenting Huizar’s past, OPB reached out Thursday to officials at the Richland School District about Monday’s shooting at Wiley Elementary School. A spokesperson for the district did not respond.
For Murray, the Yakima police chief, it’s a difficult series of events to find any meaning. He called Huizar a “predator.”
“I don’t think being a police officer made him a predator of children. I also think he clearly was just deeply angry,” Murray said. “Nothing about this is redeeming.”
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated which middle school Elias Huizar worked at as a school resource officer. OPB regrets the error.