warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
in the early hours of december 18th,2024 911 received a call from McKellips road & center street, mesa arizoan.
the caller described hearing loud noises in the trailer park thay lived in.
to them ,they sounded like gunshots ,but they were too terrified to check.officers were dispatched to the scene immediately , but with no real information at hand , they didn’t know what they were about to walk into.
this trailer pak has a violence problem.people living here aren’t usually the most forthcoming with cops. so they tried to look around the area to find any traces of a gun going off, but they found nothing.
they were starting to think that the caller was mistaken but that’s when a mystery man in a white van flagged them down .
with the witnesses statement, they finally knew what happened, a young man had fired shots at an older man in a green pickup truck,moved his body over and drove away with it.
but not before getting rid of his weapon.
the only problem is that the trailer park itself doesn’t have any security cameras and the witness mentioned dropping his glasses while working on the pole.
so, he wasn’t able to get a close look at the license plate or the assailant’s face.all they had was the collor of the vehicle and a red shirt the assialnt was vearing.
but all hope was not lost. almost all the homes in the trailer park had cameras.but that was a dead end …
but they didn’t give up .the officers scoured the entire neighborhood for the rest of the day, hopoing that one of them had captured a glimps of what might have happened.
everywhere they went ,they got the same response.” it’s been offline.”
until they finally got a lead.
they were able to track the truck’s movmement and and found it abandoned near val vista dr & mcdowell rd , mesa, AZ.
almost 6 miles away from the crime scene.
the assailant was long gone,but the truck wasn’t empty.the victim , 42- year old victor garibay was still in the passenger seat.the gunshot wounds were fatal.
over the necy few days detectives exhausted all of their resources ,hoping to find the man who did this to victor.and while it wasn’t easy.a combinatin of surveillance footage and cell phone tower data
brought them to this women’s house.maria dela hoya .they believe she picked up the suspect after he abandoned victor’s body.
they finally had a name. edgar.but there was still a lot they needed to figure out to find him.
for that, maria needed to fill in the gaps.they needed to know what happened after edgar abandoned the truck and more importantly where they could find him.
she was able to give them a location of where she dropped him off it was possible that he’s still there but why did maria drive him that day.
maria’s answers helped identify the suspect as edgar Quintero.but her involvement in his disapearance was still confusing.
until this point ,it seems that maria just thought she was helping someone from the comunity. not nowing the full extances of what he done minutes before hoping into her car.
more importantly, the evidence he could have left behind in her car.
the police needed to do this to have forensic evidence to tie edgar to the crime ,leaving no ston unturned.
but while that was processing,they traced down his adress. if he was in there, they could get all the answers directly from the source.him.
when they got to the location they heard people speaking inside ,but no one was answering the door. so they switched to plan B.
the sound was just the TV. edgar was still at large,but that didn’t last very long.the next time the detectives tracked him down, he was not expeting them.
the cold blooded killer, the cops have been looking for days is a 16 year old boy.
the 16 year old boy not only managed to killed a grown man, he tried to stached the body befor going back to his life like all never happened and detectives needed to know why.
but minutes into the interrogation,they realize that is not going to be very easy. the silence make his guilt apparent but they needed a confession.
even at this point,edgar tried to stick to the ” i dont know ” story.
but the walls was closing in on him, that didn’t keep him from reading another story though.
even thouh it was an accident , a decent human would tried to gry help at that point .but edgar’s instinct was to run.
for what detectives could gather …
edgar was just a teenager who thought guns would make him look cool on social media and commited a murder thinking he was smarter than the policebut he wasn’t.
on january 2, 2025 edgar kano Quintero wa formally indicted as an adult by the maricopa county superior court.
he faces five criminal charges, including first degree murder,armed robbery, theft of means of transportation, abandonment or concealement of a dead body and tampering with physical evidence.
the case is a waiting trial , but with the amount of evidence against him,it’s likely he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.