Mom of Emmanuel Haro Enters Not Guilty Plea as She Adds Noted Lawyer to Team By Chris Spargo

The parents of Emmanuel Haro were formally charged with his murder on Thursday.

Rebecca and Jake Haro made a brief appearance at the Riverside Hall of Justice in California to enter a not guilty plea to murder charges on Thursday morning.

The couple is accused of killing their 7-month-old son despite the fact that authorities have yet to find the infant’s remains.

There were no surprises during the very brief hearing — with one notable exception.

Rebecca, who like her husband is being represented by a public defender, had a new lawyer joining her defense team — Jeff Moore.

Riverside County Superior Court records confirm that Moore is representing Rebecca alongside her public defender, in what will be another high-profile child abuse case for the litigator.

Moore previously served as the defense attorney for Louise and David Turpin, the California couple who abused and imprisoned their 13 children and dependent adults in a ‘house of horrors’ for years.

The couple was arrested in January 2018 after one of their teenage daughters alerted authorities about the decades-long abuse she and her siblings had endured after managing to escape from their home.

Their youngest child was just 2-years-old at the time of their arrest, and their eldest was 29, at the time.

Deputies who responded to the scene said the home was covered in trash and smelled of human excrement.

Inside, they found the children malnourished and unable to understand their questions due to their limited vocabularies.

They also found one boy had been shackled to a bed for weeks.

The Turpins ultimately ended up entering a guilty plea to 14 felony counts, including charges of cruelty, torture and false imprisonment.

They are now serving life sentences for their crimes, with a possibility for parole after 25 years.

Rebecca and Jake maintain that they did not kill their son and do not know where to find the child.

Rebecca had reported that her son was kidnapped on Aug. 14 from the parking lot of a sporting goods store in Yucaipa, where she claimed she was attacked by a stranger and woke up to find her son missing.

No one doubted the grieving mother, who still had the large black eye she claimed to have sustained in the attack.

But the investigation quickly unraveled after authorities allegedly found glaring inconsistencies in Rebecca’s stories.

Investigators also said that the couple began to distance themselves, and within a week had stopped cooperating entirely. Eventually, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s

Eventually, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department publicly alleged that a kidnapping had not occurred, and that Emmanuel was believed dead.

Jake and Rebecca were arrested that same day on suspicion of murder and booked into custody. On Aug. 24, Jake briefly left jail to help investigators in their search for his son.

Authorities now believe that Emmanuel was killed days before his mother’s false reports, with the last known sighting of the child occurring on Aug. 5, according to a copy of the criminal complaint obtained by PEOPLE.

Jake and Rebecca remain in custody, and are being held on $1 million bail.

The couple are also parents to a 2-year-old child who was removed from their custody.

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.