In a desolate stretch of California desert off U.S. Highway 395, Franklin Noel Bonilla made one last desperate plea to save his life.
“I’ve been shot,” he told 911 dispatchers in Spanish, according to authorities. “I don’t know where I am.”
Officials tracked the coordinates of the phone call to a dirt road in the remote desert community of El Mirage, about 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
There they made a horrific discovery: six men with gunshot wounds, four of them with severe burns, and two abandoned vehicles, one of which was pocked with bullet holes.
Authorities think the massacre was the result of a dispute over illegal marijuana, and it marks the latest act of shocking violence in isolated areas of California where a black market for pot has flourished.
The death toll, which has included shootings and dismemberments, has alarmed law enforcement officials and comes as illegal grow operations have spread in inland desert communities across Southern California.
Hundreds of pot farms have cropped up across the desert region, bringing crime and fear with them, according to residents and law enforcement officials.
In the last year alone, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said its marijuana enforcement teams served 411 search warrants for illegal marijuana grows. They found 14 “honey oil” labs, 655,000 plants and 74,000 pounds of processed marijuana. Eleven search warrants were executed in the immediate area where the slayings took place.
“The plague is the black market of marijuana and certainly cartel activity, and a number of victims are out there,” Sheriff Shannon Dicus said.
A Times investigation last year uncovered the proliferation of illegal cannabis in California after the passage of Proposition 64, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana in the state. Although the 2016 legislation promised voters that the legal market would hobble illegal trade and its associated violence, there has been a surge in the black…