A man and woman from Santa Maria have been arrested in connection to an attempted robbery and shooting at an agricultural farm last Friday outside Buellton, where “several gunshots” were fired after the pair allegedly tried to rob field workers, according to a report from the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office.
Farmworkers escaped a scary situation that morning, shortly before 9 a.m., after the man and woman approached several workers at a farm on Highway 246, between Solvang and Buellton, and “demanded money,” according to Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Raquel Zick.
When the workers refused, the pair “returned to their white BMW sedan and fired several gunshots from their vehicle into an unoccupied parked van,” Zick said.
Nobody was injured in the incident. When law enforcement responded following reports of shots fired, the suspected shooters had already fled the scene.
In the subsequent investigation, Sheriff’s deputies were able to identify the pair as 29-year-old Stephanie Solis Garcia and 43-year-old Jason Matthew Zepeda, both from Santa Maria. Warrants were issued for their arrests while deputies continued the investigation over the weekend.
Garcia and Zepeda were later located and apprehended in Ventura on Sunday, September 22, just before 1 a.m. The pair were in the same white BMW described in the incident, and both Garcia and Zepeda were arrested and booked at Santa Barbara County’s Main Jail on felony warrants.
Garcia is facing charges for attempted robbery and conspiracy and is being held on $500,000 bail. Zepeda, the suspected shooter, was booked for attempted robbery, vandalism, discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, and conspiracy. His bail was also set at $500,000.
Representatives from the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), a group that has been sounding the alarm on the struggles of farmworkers, said that this incident was just another example of the many dangers workers face on the Central Coast.
“This is unfortunate but not surprising for us to hear this,” said MICOP Executive Director Arcenio Lopez. “The farmworkers’ communities are one of the most vulnerable worker populations in our county. We often hear of workers being victims of crime, either outside the stores where they cash their weekly checks or even by walking on the street. They are considered to be the population who most likely won’t report this type of crime because of the lack of trust they have in law enforcement or due to language barriers they face when they try to report these types of incidents.”
