The men behind a fatal Lower Merion burglary ran a gun-trafficking ring that armed criminals, DA said

The burglars who killed a Lower Merion man and severely wounded his mother during a home invasion last month that targeted the wrong house were part of a sophisticated gun trafficking ring that manufactured and sold illegally modified firearms to criminals, Montgomery County prosecutors said Friday.

Jeremy Fuentes, 26, worked at a junk-hauling business in Willow Grove with the gunmen who broke into the Gaudio family’s home on Meredith Road on Dec. 8, District Attorney Kevin Steele said as he announced Fuentes’ arrest for murder, burglary, conspiracy, and related crimes.

The guns used to commit the botched burglary helped reveal a widespread network of gun traffickers who sold rifles, pistols, and other weapons on the black market, investigators said Friday. The group modified stolen guns to turn them into automatic weapons, and used 3D printers to create untraceable “ghost guns.”

“There’s a lot of danger and a lot of gun violence that is going to come from this organization and what they have done here,” said Steele, who noted that his office is still trying to determine how many weapons were produced and distributed by the gun ring.

“They’re fueling gun violence,” he added. “They’re putting mechanisms of death out on the streets that are very difficult to trace.”

The men who broke into the home — Kelvin Roberts, 41, and Charles Fulforth, 42 — were arrested days after the home invasion and charged with murder, burglary, and related offenses. They will now face additional charges, Steele said, including racketeering and conspiracy, for their involvement in the gun ring.

Five other members of the trafficking organization were identified Friday as Aaron Hiller, 24; Marcus Lee Jackson, 33; Jonathan Rodriguez, 26; Corry Simpson; and Frances Staten, 38, all of Philadelphia.

Three members of the group — Hiller, Rodriguez and Staten — have been taken into custody, while the two others are still being sought, Steele said. They will also all be charged with racketeering, conspiracy, and related crimes.

Fuentes, Roberts, and Fulforth worked for Junkluggers, a business that hauled away unwanted furniture and other items from area homes. Steele said the three had targeted a home in Bucks County where an elderly couple had hired the service to haul away some items.

(Investigators said four of the other suspects in the gun ring had previously worked for Junkluggers, but were not employed there at the time of the home invasion.)

Fuentes, who visited the home to give the couple an estimate, noticed several gun safes in the basement and hatched a plan for Roberts and Fulforth to return and steal the weapons for the gun-trafficking operation, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.

That plan went awry when the two men went to the wrong house, in the wrong county.

Text messages recovered from the men’s cell phones showed that Fuentes gave Fulforth and Roberts wrong information about the address, directing them to the Lower Merion home where Bernadette Gaudio lived with her son Andrew, according to court filings.

During the burglary, Andrew Gaudio, 25, was killed trying to protect his mother, according to investigators. Bernadette Gaudio, who was bedridden with a leg injury, was shot multiple times in her neck and torso, and rendered paralyzed.

Roberts and Fulforth have both admitted to participating in the burglary, but it remained unclear who shot the Gaudios; Roberts told investigators Fulforth fired the shots, but Fulforth has refused to provide details.

Detectives recovered two guns they believe were used in the shooting, a .25-caliber handgun the suspects left behind at the Gaudios’ home, and a 9mm pistol that Fulforth had in his apartment in Jenkintown.

Forensic tests showed that the 9mm was the gun that killed Andrew Gaudio. Shell casings found at the scene match the .25-caliber weapon, investigators said. In an interview, Fuentes told police he had given Fulforth the components needed to create a .25-caliber ghost gun a few weeks before the burglary.

Inside Fulforth’s apartment, detectives found a “highly sophisticated, clandestine firearms production facility” that he used to make ghost guns using three 3D printers, according to Steele. There, he said, Fulforth created suppressors for weapons as well as “switches” that turned the guns into automatic weapons, increasing the street value of the firearms by at least $1,000.

Steele called the weapons Fulforth produced “silent machine guns” that have incredibly fast fire rates. At Friday’s news conference, he showed a side-by-side comparison of a handgun equipped with a switch firing alongside a Thompson machine gun. The handgun was faster than the machine gun.

A video taken from Fulforth’s phone showed him creating a handgun that closely resembles the 9mm gun used to kill Andrew Gaudio, investigators said. Detectives recovered extensive text message conversations between Fulforth and other members of the ring in which they discussed potential buyers of the illegal guns, took specific orders from customers and noted that switches made the guns for sale much more valuable and sought after.

Fulforth also shared pictures and videos of the assembly process with his coconspirators, Steele said, including one in which he poses next to a 3D printer as it created a suppressor.

Efforts to reach representatives of Junkluggers, the business where Fuentes, Roberts and Fulforth worked, were unsuccessful. The company did not respond to numerous requests for comment about the men, who all have criminal records, including felony convictions that prevented them from legally carrying weapons.

Steele said Junkluggers had played an unwitting role in the burglary. Detectives, he said, were still investigating whether any other homeowners who hired the company had been victims of burglaries.