3473 Avocado Vista Ln, Fallbrook, CA 92028
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Author: Jewls Krueger
Joseph and Summer McStay lived in this house in the unincorporated community of Fallbrook, California, with their two young sons. On February 4, 2010, all four disappeared. The house showed no sign of forced entry or struggle. Bowls of popcorn sat in the living room, a carton of eggs was left on the kitchen counter, and the family's two dogs were left in the backyard.
For nearly four years the case was treated as a possible voluntary disappearance. That ended in November 2013, when a motorcyclist in the Mojave Desert spotted a small skull in the sand. Joseph's former business associate, Charles "Chase" Merritt, was convicted of all four murders in 2019.
Joseph McStay, 40, owned and operated Earth Inspired Products, a company that designed and sold custom decorative water fountains, largely online. Summer McStay, 43, was born Virginia Lisa Aranda. Their sons were Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3.
The family had been living in a small place near the coast in San Clemente, where friends remembered them surfing and biking together. As the boys grew, they bought a larger house about 45 minutes inland. Property records show the sale closed on November 17, 2009. They had only just started renovations when they vanished.
Merritt worked with Joseph on the manufacturing side of the fountain business and has been described in court and in news coverage as both a business partner and a business associate. He was in his late fifties at the time of the disappearance and had prior felony convictions for burglary and receiving stolen property.
After the family went missing, Merritt was publicly supportive of the search. He gave interviews, said he had passed a polygraph, and told CNN in 2014 that he had no idea what had happened. In that same interview he said something that drew investigators' attention: that he was almost certainly the last person to see Joseph.
At 8:28 p.m. on February 4, 2010, Joseph's cell phone pinged a Fallbrook tower. Merritt later told police that Joseph called him that evening and that he let it go to voicemail because he was watching a movie.
Over the following days, relatives could not reach anyone in the family. Sheriff's deputies conducted a welfare check on February 10 but did not go inside. On February 13, Joseph's brother Michael climbed through an open window at the back of the house. He found no one home, food left out, and the dogs unfed. On February 15, the family was reported missing to the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. Homicide investigators searched the house under a warrant on February 19 and found nothing indicating violence.
On February 8, the family's 1996 Isuzu Trooper was towed from a strip mall parking lot in San Ysidro, near the Mexican border. Security staff believed it had been parked there sometime between 5:30 and 7:00 that evening. Where the vehicle had been between February 4 and February 8 was never established.
Because of the car's location, investigators reviewed footage from the pedestrian crossing into Mexico. Video recorded on the evening of February 8 appeared to show a family of four resembling the McStays walking across the border. In April 2013, the San Diego Sheriff's Department stated it believed the family had left voluntarily.
Relatives never accepted this. They pointed out that Joseph and Summer avoided Mexico because of safety concerns, that more than $100,000 sat untouched in their accounts, and that Summer's passport had expired. Joseph's father said flatly that the man in the video did not walk like his son. When Merritt was arrested in 2014, Detective Chris Fisher told reporters there was no evidence the family had traveled to Mexico and described the border video as unrelated to the case.
On November 11, 2013, an off-road motorcyclist found human remains in two shallow graves in the Mojave Desert north of Victorville, roughly 100 miles from the house. Two days later the remains were identified as the McStays. A three-pound sledgehammer had been buried alongside them.
The San Bernardino County coroner ruled the cause of death for all four to be blunt force trauma to the head. In January 2015, San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon stated that investigators believed the family had been killed inside their Fallbrook home before they were ever moved.
A memorial was later erected in the desert near the graves. Morbid Tourism covers that location on a separate page.
Further Reading
Merritt was arrested at his home in Chatsworth on November 5, 2014, and the Sheriff's Department announced the arrest on November 7. He was charged with four counts of murder and pleaded not guilty. The case was delayed for years as he cycled through attorneys and represented himself at points.
The trial opened in San Bernardino on January 7, 2019. Prosecutors argued that Joseph was cutting Merritt out of the business over poor performance, that Joseph told him on February 1, 2010 that he owed $42,845, and that Merritt did not have the money. They presented evidence that he wrote himself checks from the business account totaling more than $21,000, backdated to February 4, and that he was gambling heavily. They also told jurors that Merritt grew up near the gravesite and that his phone pinged a tower overlooking it on February 6, two days after the family vanished.
The defense argued the prosecution had the wrong man. Merritt said he was at home with his girlfriend, that he had not been fired, and that he was not in financial trouble. His attorneys said he had permission to write the checks and that backdating was routine practice at the company. They emphasized that there were no signs of an attack inside the house and argued that investigators had overlooked another possible suspect.
On June 10, 2019, the jury convicted Merritt on four counts of first-degree murder and found the multiple-murder special circumstance true. On June 24 the jury recommended three death sentences. On January 21, 2020, Judge Michael Smith imposed death sentences for the murders of Summer, Gianni, and Joseph Jr., and life without the possibility of parole for the murder of Joseph McStay. Merritt maintained his innocence at sentencing.
California has had a moratorium on executions since March 2019, so no execution date has been set. ABC News reported in October 2025 that Merritt remains incarcerated in a San Diego prison. He told the network he is preparing a habeas petition alleging prosecutorial misconduct, abuse of discretion, judicial error, and ineffective assistance of counsel. He continues to insist he did not kill the family.
The house sits at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on Avocado Vista Lane, in the Lake Rancho Viejo area of Fallbrook, just east of where Interstate 15 meets Highway 76. Fallbrook is unincorporated San Diego County, known regionally for its avocado groves. The property is a five bedroom, three bathroom house of roughly 2,780 square feet, and it is still standing.
This is a private residence. The people living there now have no connection to what happened in 2010. Stay on public roads and sidewalks, do not enter the property, and do not approach or attempt to contact the current residents or their neighbors. Members of the McStay family are still living with this loss, and one of the couple's surviving relatives spoke at Merritt's sentencing.
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