What Happened to Gavin Battle? He Was Found Dead in His Vehicle in January 2021

One of the most important jobs a homicide detective has is securing a crime scene. It's the first step taken to hopefully catch the person who did it, and in this case the "it" is murder. Special Agent Elaina Honea is a Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) crime scene specialist who spoke with Police Magazine about what happens during this process. After making sure the area is clear and safe, preserving the evidence is their utmost priority.

In January 2021, police were called to investigate an unresponsive individual who was found in a vehicle in Lake Elsinore, Calif. They undoubtedly had to treat the car and the area around it as a crime scene. Initially, this probably didn't feel like a homicide until they investigated further. That's when things took a turn. So, what happened to Gavin Battle? Here's what we know.

Lake Elsinore police were sent to the 29000 block of Central Ave. after someone reported an unresponsive adult man in his car, per NBC Palm Springs. It was determined that the individual, later identified as Gavin Battle, had died from possible drug-related cardiac arrest. An autopsy revealed that Battle's cause of death was fentanyl poisoning.

The 26-year-old's death was then treated as a homicide by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department Overdose Death Investigations and Narcotics Unit. This team spent months looking into Battle's death and found that 31-year-old Everardo Martinez Rodriguez was the person responsible for selling an "undisclosed quantity of the synthetic opioid" to Battle.

Police obtained an arrest warrant and served it at Rodriguez's home on March 4, 2022. He was arrested and charged with murder. Rodriguez's bail was set at $1 million, per the Canyon Lake Insider. The Lake Elsinore Patch reported that Rodriguez was sentenced to 11 years in prison in July 2023. He pleaded "guilty in May to voluntary manslaughter and sentence-enhancing allegations of targeting a vulnerable victim and taking advantage of a position of trust." In exchange for that, a second-degree murder charge was dropped.

In September 2023, Battle's mother filmed an 11-second video for the @onemethodcenter TikTok. In it she is holding a picture of her son while explaining that he was "given a blue pill by his barber," and took it, thinking it was Percocet. Crying, she said, "My baby was found in a car, dead."

As heartbreaking as that TikTok is, nothing compares to the video shared of his mother's response to finding out her son was dead. It was taken from her Ring camera and uploaded by @alyssasdad26. In it, a member of the Lake Elsinore police department is telling the distraught mother that her son was found dead. The 74-second video is comprised of the gut-wrenching screams of a broken-hearted mother.