CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — Nervous neighbors were burning lights at night in a northern Nevada community where Connie Koontz and Sophia Renken were killed this month in slayings that authorities blame on a 19-year-old from El Salvador said to be in the U.S. illegally.
Residents also were on edge about an hour’s drive north, where Gerald David, 81, and his 80-year-old wife, Sharon, were found shot dead Jan. 16 in their south Reno home. The Davids were prominent members and officers of the Reno Rodeo Association.
Authorities are blaming the four killings over a six-day span on Wilbur Ernesto Martinez-Guzman, who was arrested Saturday in Carson City.
“It definitely shook a lot of people up,” Gardnerville Ranchos resident Michael Lucas said Wednesday of the cases made part of the immigration debate when President Donald Trump cited them as evidence of the need for the proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall at the heart of a partial government shutdown.
“Four people in Nevada viciously robbed and killed by an illegal immigrant who should not have been in our Country,” Trump said in a Monday tweet. “We need a powerful Wall!”
Authorities in Nevada’s Washoe and Douglas counties, where the victims lived, have not said if robbery was a motive.
But prosecutors in the two counties have said they plan in coming days to charge Martinez-Guzman with the killings.
First, however, he’ll be charged in Carson City on Thursday with burglary and stolen property crimes — amid prosecutors’ arguments that he should remain jailed while investigators keep looking for links between him and the four dead people.
“They’re continuing to look at, ‘How were these cases connected?’” Carson City Sheriff Ken Furlong said. “I have a hard time believing these were random.”
Federal immigration authorities told Furlong that Martinez-Guzman was from El Salvador and is in the U.S. illegally. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have not provided details about how he entered the U.S.
Some information about the killings could emerge during bail arguments before Justice of the Peace Thomas Armstrong. Martinez-Guzman also is expected to have a lawyer appointed to his case.
District Attorney Jason Woodbury said investigators found that Martinez-Guzman was cashing in the victims’ belongings at pawn shops, but no evidence of similar killings in the state capital city.
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