Family fights to keep Justine Vanderschoot's killers behind bars

Placer County prosecutors have joined Justine Vanderschoot’s family in asking the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to keep Brandon Fernandez and Daniel Bezemer in prison. County officials said Fernandez was denied parole on July 28, while Bezemer’s hearing was scheduled for Aug. 10, and Fernandez had already been denied in 2022.

Justine Vanderschoot was 17 when she disappeared on Labor Day in 2003 in Placer County, California. Daniel Bezemer and Brandon Fernandez were convicted that same year of strangulation and murder. CBS Sacramento said Fernandez helped Bezemer dig the shallow grave for the teenager, who was found with dirt in her esophagus. A 2024 People story described the killing as a burial alive by her boyfriend and said jealousy was behind the attack.

The Vanderschoot family’s fight has become a recurring part of California’s parole process, where relatives of murder victims are drawn back into hearings long after the original trial ends. The Placer County District Attorney’s Office said it is joining the family’s plea to deny release, and local officials and prosecutors have publicly backed that effort through parole hearings and evidentiary hearings.

The district attorney’s office said it has spent more than a decade confronting what it calls a growing crisis inside California’s post-conviction system, pointing to emergency regulations, administrative loopholes and a lack of public oversight. For the Vanderschoots, that means the case does not end with the convictions from 2003; it returns each time a parole review opens the question of whether the men who killed a 17-year-old girl should remain behind bars.