An Elk Grove man who murdered his parents in their garage to collect his inheritance will never leave prison. Mark Andre Tomas Navarrete, 46, was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office announced — the sentence closing a case that began with two bodies found in an Elk Grove home in June 2024.

Source: Elk Grove News

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman imposed the sentence. Navarrete's sentencing had been set for Friday, November 13, at 9 a.m. before Judge Bowman, and the DA's office announced the outcome the same day. The sentence is the maximum the office had said he faced, and because the two life terms run consecutively and carry no possibility of parole, Navarrete will spend the rest of his life in state prison.

The sentencing is the final chapter of the case Awaaz Punjab reported last month, when a jury convicted Navarrete of the double murder. Read the earlier report here: Elk Grove man convicted of murdering his parents for financial gain

What the jury decided in October

On October 16, 2026, a jury convicted Navarrete of two counts of first-degree murder. Jurors also found true the special allegations that he committed multiple murders and that the murders were carried out for financial gain. The case was prosecuted by Principal Criminal Attorney Aaron Miller of the DA's Homicide Unit.

Source: Sacramento County District Attorney's Office

June 28, 2024: the morning of the murders

Prosecutors said Navarrete drove from his Elk Grove home to his parents' neighbourhood on June 28, 2024, parked a few blocks from their house, put on a mask and gloves, and rode a kick scooter to the home. He entered through a side gate to avoid the front-porch Ring camera, got his parents into the garage, struck both of them on the head with an object and strangled them. His father, Augusto Tacsuan Navarrete, was 73; his mother, Marjorie Jane Tomas Navarrete, was 70. Elk Grove police responded to the home on Crosscourt Way and found the couple dead inside.

The cover-up began the same morning. Navarrete drove away in his parents' car, parked it a short distance from where he had left his own vehicle, and rode the scooter back. Later that morning he texted his dead parents asking whether they wanted to come over for dinner. When his sister grew worried because she could not reach their parents, Navarrete drove to the house with his own children and, in the DA's words, 'discovered' his deceased parents.

How detectives built the case

Elk Grove Police Department detectives found the kick scooter in Navarrete's garage. DNA analysis identified his DNA under his mother's fingernails. And footage from Flock cameras and other traffic cameras captured his movements on the day of the murders, helping investigators reconstruct the route prosecutors laid out at trial — from his home, to the parked car blocks away, to the scooter ride to his parents' door.

The motive, prosecutors said, was money and resentment. Navarrete had been scamming his friends and family with fake investments, promising to repay them at exorbitant interest rates, according to the DA's office. His parents had paid back other family members for debts he owed, and detectives determined he had begun to resent them for it. At the time of the killings, he stood to inherit half of his parents' estate — the financial-gain allegation the jury found true, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Source: Los Angeles Times

For Elk Grove — a Sacramento suburb with a large Punjabi and South Asian community — the case has been one of the most disturbing local crimes in recent memory: a son who, on the prosecution's proven account, planned around a doorbell camera, wore a mask and gloves, and then staged a family discovery of the scene with his children beside him. Friday's sentence means the criminal case is now complete; the DA's announcement carried no report of an appeal, and with no parole eligibility there is no future release proceeding for the family to face.