Jury Convicts Man Of Killing 4 In Omaha, Including Monroeville Native
OMAHA, Neb. (KDKA/AP) - A former doctor was convicted Wednesday of killing four people with ties to an Omaha medical school, including a doctor originally from Monroeville and his wife.
The Douglas County jury found Anthony Garcia guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. He now faces either life in prison or death - if voters opt on Nov. 8 to keep Nebraska's death penalty.
The trial included weeks of testimony.
Garcia, 42, of Terra Haute, Indiana, was convicted of fatally stabbing 11-year-old Thomas Hunter, son of Creighton University School of Medicine faculty member Dr. William Hunter; and the family's housekeeper, 57-year-old Shirlee Sherman, in 2008 at the family's home in an upscale Omaha neighborhood.
That case remained unsolved for years, until the 2013 Mother's Day deaths of another Creighton pathology doctor, Roger Brumback, and his wife, Mary, both 65, in their Omaha home.
Roger Brumback had been shot and stabbed; his wife was stabbed to death.
Brumback was a 1965 graduate of Gateway High School, and in 1971 he graduated from Penn State with a medical degree. Before relocating, Brumback had a pediatric practice in the Wilkins Township area.
Carol Brumback said Wednesday evening that despite the conviction of her brother's killer, "There will never be any closure, because my brother and my sister-in-law are gone."
Before their deaths, the couple was on the verge of starting a new life in West Virginia after Brumback recently announced his retirement.
Days after their deaths, a memorial was held for them on the Creighton campus.
Carol Brumback said she was elated by the conviction. She said it was "really bad that after the first set of killings, they didn't catch [Garcia]. Then, he did the second set of killings, and my brother got caught in the crossfire of this whole thing."
She has set up a scholarship fund at Hershey Medical School in her brother's name for deserving medical students because of her brother's passion for education.
Clues in that killing offered up similarities to the killings at the Hunter house five years earlier, and a police task force was formed to look into possible ties between the two events. Investigators said the evidence pointed to Garcia, who they said acted on his long-simmering rage over being fired by the two doctors from the medical school's residency program in 2001.
Prosecutors said Garcia blamed the doctors for informing other medical schools around the country of the firing, keeping Garcia from being accepted to several of them and from being approved for medical licenses in other states.
More digging turned up Garcia's credit card purchases and cellphone records putting him in and around Omaha on May 12, 2013, the day the Brumbacks were killed. Police arrested Garcia on a southern Illinois highway about two months after the Brumback killings.
A search of the Brumbacks' home address was found on Garcia's smartphone the day of their deaths, prosecutors said, and authorities linked him to an attempted break-in at another Creighton pathology department doctor's home earlier that day.
Carol Brumback told KDKA-TV's Ralph Iannotti, "During the trial, I was watching [Garcia] when they were showing evidence of the crime scene, and I could swear he was smirking, and that is so horrible that somebody would do that."
In the 2008 Hunter home killings, neighborhood witnesses had told police they had seen an olive-skinned man in the neighborhood and at the door of William Hunter's home. They also reported a silver Honda CRV with out-of-state plates.
Police later found that Garcia drove that type of vehicle in 2008, when he lived in and had the vehicle registered in Louisiana.
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