Volume 20 · Chapter 7
The Gilbert Goons
Treston Billey, Jacob Meisner, Taylor Sherman and others
Victim: Preston Lord
Case at a glance
- When
- October 2023
- Where
- Queen Creek and Gilbert, Arizona
- Perpetrator
- Talan Renner, Treston Billey, Taylor Sherman, Jacob Meisner, Dominic Turner, Talyn Vigil and William “Owen” Hines
- Victim
- Preston Lord
- Outcome
- William Hines pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced in May 2025; the other six were awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges as of September 2026
The case
Preston Lord was sixteen and lived in San Tan Valley, Arizona. On the night of October 28, 2023, he went to a Halloween party at a house on Via Del Rancho in neighboring Queen Creek. For roughly a year before that, teenagers in the affluent East Valley suburbs had been trading clips of group beatings on Snapchat, credited to a loose crew known online as the Gilbert Goons.
Preston left the party with friends. A group followed him into the street near 194th Street and Via Del Rancho and knocked him down. A 911 call came in at 9:49 p.m., and officers found him in the roadway within three minutes. He never regained consciousness and died of head injuries on October 30. After months of collecting phone video, a grand jury indicted seven defendants in March 2024: Talan Renner, Treston Billey, Taylor Sherman, Jacob Meisner, Dominic Turner, Talyn Vigil and William “Owen” Hines.
Hines pleaded guilty to manslaughter in March 2025 and was sentenced that May to twelve years, with five more for a drunk-driving assault. The other six still face first-degree murder and kidnapping charges. Their cases were severed and the trial date pushed back repeatedly; in September 2026 a judge set Meisner’s trial for that November. Arizona’s governor signed Preston’s Law in May 2025, making group “swarming” attacks a felony.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 20 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 20 on AmazonCase photographs
13 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“I kept coming back to how long this ran before anyone died. Beatings were filmed and passed around for months, and plenty of adults in those neighborhoods had seen the clips. Preston Lord walked into something that had been building in plain sight, and the slow pace of the charges tells its own story.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
