Police have arrested a man they believe killed a Phoenix mother 26 years ago, and found him hiding out in Mexico.
The Phoenix Police Department announced on Friday that Javier Lorenzano-Nunez, 58, was arrested for the killing of Sarah Jane Carr, 28.
On July 9, 1998, police in Phoenix responded to a shooting at a home just before midnight. A 911 caller told a dispatcher that a girl had been shot, and that a man had pulled the trigger.
When police entered the home, they found Carr dead on the ground. She had been shot in the face.
The name of the shooter remained unknown for more than two decades, but police reportedly knew what the suspect looked like, according to Detective Dominick Roestenberg, who spoke with AZFamily.com.
“We knew who did it, but we just didn’t have the name of the person,” he told the outlet.
The witness who called 911 saw the man who shot Carr and gave a description.
In 2016, police identified the suspect as Lorenzano-Nunez. Prior to that police only knew him by his nickname, “G.”
Lorenzano-Nunez allegedly spent several years in California before he moved to Mexico.
Nearly 10 years after he was identified, police in Phoenix and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office indicted him and issued an arrest warrant for Carr’s killing.
Detectives worked with the Department of Justice, which collaborated with police in Mexico to track Lorenzano-Nunez down.
Once Mexican law enforcement caught up with him, he was arrested on a count of premeditated first-degree murder and was transported back to the US on Wednesday.
Garrett Miller, Carr’s son, is an adult and has become a police officer in Austin, Texas. He told AZFamily that the feeling of frustration that his mother’s killer was never brought to justice influenced his decision to go into law enforcement.
Now, he may finally have that justice.
“This was definitely one of the reasons that did help pave my way into law enforcement. That feeling that I had that I would never get justice. It was something I didn’t want other people to feel,” he told AZFamily. If I could give people a glimmer of hope that something could be done or some type of closure I would try and do so because I don’t want them to feel the way I felt.”
