For two Bay Area men, a recent trip to Hawaii has taken a macabre twist after a man they met and befriended is now accused of murder, NBC Bay Area first reported.
A third friend, from Los Angeles, was also initially arrested in connection with the murder, but was later released after the Honolulu Police Department determined he was not involved.
The two Bay Area friends — San Francisco resident Ronald Wu and Oakland resident Mohammad Daudie — were visiting Honolulu with their friend, Los Angeles resident Scott Hannon.
While in Honololu, the visitors met Juan Tejedor Baron, 23, and they quickly became friends while enjoying the city’s nightlife. “Since I’m in Hawaii and I want to make friends, he seemed very nice actually,” Daudie told NBC Bay Area.
Baron invited the trio to what he claimed was his home in the gated luxury community of Hawaii Loa Ridge. Daudie told NBC that while nothing at the home seemed amiss, he did notice that “there’s like a bar on the bedrooms, like you can’t just enter easily.”
Wu and Daudie returned to the Bay Area, while their friend Hannon decided to stay another week with Baron.
However, it turned out that the home did not belong to Baron, but instead to 73-year-old Gary Ruby; the two were in a relationship, police said. Police went to the Hawaii Loa Ridge residence on March 7, 2022, for a welfare check requested by Ruby’s brother after not hearing from his sibling for three weeks, an affidavit filed with Honolulu’s District Court of the First Circuit states.
The officers allegedly observed that the master bathroom’s bathtub was covered in concrete, and oddly, it smelled like coffee. After obtaining a search warrant, the officers uncovered Ruby’s body encased in the concrete, with layers of coffee grounds. Baron later admitted that the coffee layers were to cover up the smell of the body, the affidavit says.
On March 10, Los Angeles Police Department officers and U.S. Marshals arrested Baron and Hannon in Anaheim after locating the duo on a Greyhound bus heading to Mexico. While Hannon was released after authorities determined that he was not involved in the murder, Baron reportedly confessed to killing Ruby, according to the affidavit.
Baron is currently in Los Angeles, where he is awaiting extradition back to Hawaii to face the charges against him, which include murder in the second degree.
For Wu and Daudie, they are shocked that the “nice” man that they danced and drank with would turn out to be an accused murderer.
“I believe he’s a psycho killer, because who would stay in that place for weeks, with a dead body there?” Daudie told NBC Bay Area.