On the afternoon of March 13, 2008, Dr. William Hunter walked home through the Dundee neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska, and noticed that his housekeeper's car was still in the driveway. The front door was closed but not latched. His son's Xbox was on, which was unusual, because Thomas always turned it off when he finished playing. Inside, Hunter found Shirlee Sherman in the back hallway and his 11-year-old son in the dining room. Both had been stabbed in the neck with knives from the family's own kitchen, and the knives had been left in place.
The case stayed open for more than five years. It was solved only after a second attack, on Mother's Day 2013, killed another pathologist from the same Creighton University department and his wife. The man convicted of all four killings was a doctor the two pathologists had dismissed from their residency program in 2001: Anthony J. Garcia.
Garcia grew up in Walnut, California, the older of two sons of Fred Garcia, a postal worker and Vietnam veteran, and Estella Garcia, a registered nurse who was born in Mexico. According to CBS News's "48 Hours," he played football, served as an altar boy and wanted to become a brain surgeon. He went to college in California and to medical school at the University of Utah. His family later said he had struggled with depression and migraines.
His training did not go smoothly. In 1999 he resigned from his first residency, at Bassett-Saint Elizabeth's in Utica, New York, after complaints about unprofessional behavior. The Associated Press reported in 2013 that he had quit that program to avoid a disciplinary hearing over yelling at a radiology resident.
In July 2000 he began a pathology residency at Creighton University in Omaha. Dr. William Hunter oversaw the residents. Dr. Roger Brumback chaired the department. Dr. Chhanda Bewtra, another member of the faculty, later testified that the problems started almost at once. "He was the worst resident in my 40 years of teaching," she told the jury in 2016. "Right from the beginning he was adversarial, he did not like me. He was rude in the class, and he was quite disruptive in my class." She wrote evaluations and formal complaints to Hunter in 2001 and said it was the first time she had ever recommended that a pathology resident be suspended. Hunter testified about a memo he had written to himself after an autopsy in February 2001, when he and another doctor thought Garcia had made a mistake. "I was kind of shocked at the defensive comments Dr. Garcia made," he said. "He was very sharp and didn't take the criticism."
Prosecutors later described the reasons for his dismissal as "arrogance, disrespect, incompetence." He was written up, recommended for probation and then for termination, and Hunter and Brumback signed the termination letter. A letter Brumback sent to Indiana's licensing agency in January 2013 said Garcia had been fired after trying to sabotage a fellow resident: he had called the colleague's wife during a high-pressure exam and insisted that the colleague come back to the department. Garcia threatened to sue and appealed the decision, but never filed a lawsuit. Most sources date the firing to 2001; one passage of the Nebraska Supreme Court's 2023 opinion gives 2000.
After Creighton, Garcia's career went from one program to the next. He worked as a resident at the University of Illinois Hospital in 2003 and obtained an Illinois medical license. Public records showed that he had held licenses in California, Illinois and Indiana since 2003. He filed for bankruptcy in 2005, listing more than $81,000 in debt, about $1,000 in cash and a 2000 Honda CR-V.
He was admitted to a residency at Louisiana State University, which prosecutors said he got by lying about his past. It lasted about six months. According to the prosecution's opening statement, he was terminated on February 28, 2008. In February 2008 the Louisiana medical board denied him a license, partly because of the Creighton firing. Records showed a silver Honda CR-V registered to him in Shreveport from 2007 to 2009.
The State's theory, accepted by the jury and later summarized by the Nebraska Supreme Court, was that Garcia blamed Creighton for these setbacks. Prosecutors said Hunter and Brumback had informed other programs of the dismissal, which kept him out of several of them and cost him licenses in other states.
Thomas Hunter was 11 and in sixth grade. CBS News described him as a bright, ordinary boy who loved science and math, Xbox, Dr Pepper and potato chips. He was the youngest of four sons of Dr. William Hunter and Dr. Claire Hunter, who worked in Creighton's cardiology division. The family lived in a large house in Dundee, a historic neighborhood that is also home to Warren Buffett. After Garcia was sentenced, Claire Hunter said: "Thomas was a wonderful, lively child. He was a joy in everybody's life and he didn't deserve what happened to him."
Shirlee Sherman was the family's part-time housekeeper and a grandmother of five. Her son, Jeff Sherman, called her a caregiver and a "nurturer." Her brothers, Bradley and Daniel Waite, attended the trial and the sentencing. Most reports give her age as 57; a 2013 report by WPXI gives 58.
Claire Hunter was in Hawaii at a medical conference that week. William Hunter was working in the pathology lab. Thomas came home from school and went to the basement playroom, and Sherman was working in the house.
Several people in Dundee noticed a stranger that afternoon. Between about 3 and 4 p.m., neighbors saw a silver Honda CR-V moving slowly through the streets or parked on 53rd Street, and a man in a dark suit carrying a messenger bag. Some took him for a door-to-door salesman. One neighbor, Dana Boyle, described him to police as of Middle Eastern descent, with olive skin and dark hair. The car had an out-of-state rear plate and no front plate. William Hunter himself testified that, walking to pick up his children from school, he saw a strange man dressed in dark clothing walking toward his house.
Hunter came home at about 5 p.m. and found the two bodies. "I didn't know how to explain what I was seeing," he told the jury eight years later. "It didn't seem real to me." He touched his son's hand to check for a pulse, then called 911. "I was also looking at it from a clinical standpoint," he said.
Nothing had been taken. Sherman's purse was on the kitchen table, and $833 in cash was untouched. The knives in both victims had come from the butcher block in the Hunters' kitchen. Police found no usable trace of the killer. A neighbor who lived nearby remembered firefighters coming out of the house with their heads down. "That little Hunter boy isn't home," he told KMTV in 2016. "That hurts."
Detectives had a description, a car and very little else. Police released a sketch based on the neighbors' accounts, the reward rose above $50,000, and the case was featured on "America's Most Wanted" in 2012. None of it produced a suspect. Omaha police later said that the seven years between Garcia's firing and the 2008 killings helped explain why his name never came up. "For most people, that's such a long time in between," said Lt. Darci Tierney.
Garcia, meanwhile, went on with his life. The Nebraska Supreme Court later summarized the evidence this way: he waited nearly five years, "during which time he attempted to further his education, obtained employment, and bought a house and a vehicle." He settled in Terre Haute, Indiana. He later lost a job in a prison medical unit. He became a regular at a club in Terre Haute, where Cecilia Hoffmann worked as a dancer from about June 2012 to July 2013. In about November 2012, she later testified, Garcia told her he had killed "an old lady and a boy." She thought he was joking. A detective testified at the 2013 preliminary hearing that when Hoffmann tried to end the relationship and told Garcia he was too good for her, he replied, "I'm not as good as you think." She last saw him at the club in February or March 2013.
In January 2013 Brumback wrote to Indiana's licensing agency about Garcia's dismissal, and in the months before May 2013 Indiana declined to give him a permanent license. His temporary Indiana license expired that January. In March 2013, according to evidence at the preliminary hearing, he bought a handgun in Indiana.
Roger Brumback grew up in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Gateway High School in 1965. He trained as a neurologist and pathologist, worked at UPMC Presbyterian and Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh in 1977 and 1978, and the couple had also been part of the community in Oklahoma City before Omaha. He chaired Creighton's pathology department from 2001 through 2010, did research on childhood disease and later on Alzheimer's disease, and was described by the university as a perfectionist who was popular with students and faculty. He was 65. He had just announced that he would retire the following month.
Mary Brumback was also 65. The couple had three children, and they planned to move to land they owned in West Virginia. In May 2013 Roger was painting the entryway to get the house ready to sell. Todd Cooper, who covered the case for the Omaha World-Herald, told CBS News that Mary "could not have had an enemy in the world." A family friend, Laura Neece-Baltaro, told KETV that the Brumbacks had done a great deal for the community in Omaha and in Oklahoma City. "They still had a lot to give back," she said.
On Friday, May 10, 2013, according to evidence at trial, a search was run on Garcia's tablet computer for the address of Chhanda Bewtra. Searches were also made that weekend for the address of the Bewtras' daughter, who was in India at the time.
On Sunday, May 12, Mother's Day, Chhanda Bewtra and her husband, Dr. Againdra Bewtra, were at brunch. Elderly guests moving slowly delayed their departure. They were less than three minutes from home when their security company called: the alarm had gone off. Someone had pushed in a back door, then fled when the alarm sounded. "If we were home, we wouldn't be alive," Chhanda Bewtra told CBS News. "But the Brumbacks would not be dead."
According to phone records presented at trial, a search for the Brumbacks' address was made on Garcia's smartphone right after the failed break-in. Credit card records placed him at a Wingstop restaurant in Omaha, about a mile from the Bewtra home, within about two hours of when police believed the Brumbacks were attacked. Prosecutors said he was in Omaha for only about four hours.
At the Brumback home in west Omaha, Roger Brumback was shot in the doorway and then stabbed in the neck. Mary Brumback was stabbed to death. She had defensive wounds, and one of her thumbs was nearly severed. Nothing of value was taken, and there was no sign of forced entry.
By 5:15 p.m., a call to Garcia's phone was routed through a tower in Atlantic, Iowa, about an hour east of Omaha. By about 7 p.m. he was near West Des Moines, where a hotel clerk later testified that she remembered him checking in.
The Brumbacks were found on Tuesday, May 14, 2013. CNN reported that a piano mover who arrived at the house found an ammunition magazine wedged in the doorway and Mary Brumback's body inside, and that officers were also responding to a welfare call. The court later found that the couple died sometime between 2:40 p.m. on May 12 and 9:40 a.m. on May 14, most likely on May 12. A video the couple's daughter recorded with them that afternoon showed them in the clothes they were found in, and Mary Brumback's daily journal had no entry for May 12. The Brumbacks were buried in Monroeville. At a prayer service at Creighton, students wore their white coats in tribute.
Investigators saw at once that the wounds resembled those inflicted on Thomas Hunter and Shirlee Sherman, and that Roger Brumback and William Hunter had worked in the same 12-person pathology department. On May 20, 2013, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer announced a task force of more than a dozen Omaha officers, state officials and the FBI. "Certainly one angle we're exploring, very hard, is whether the 2008 and the 2013 homicides are related," he said. An anonymous donor put up a $25,000 reward.
Detectives Derek Mois and Scott Warner turned to the department's history and pulled residency files going back to 2000. Garcia's file stood out: he had been dismissed, and Hunter and Brumback had signed the letter. Records then showed that he had owned a silver Honda CR-V registered in Louisiana in 2008. A May 25, 2013, warrant for his cell phone and tower records became the basis for later warrants. Those records, along with credit card receipts, put him in and around Omaha on May 12.
The Nebraska Supreme Court later listed the links among the three scenes: each victim was tied to the department that had dismissed Garcia; the killer had entered the Hunter and Brumback homes, and tried to enter the Bewtra home, without force; nothing of value was taken; and all four victims had similar knife wounds to the neck. The neck wounds cut major arteries or veins in all four victims. Parts of a gun recovered at the Brumback home, a detective testified, matched the model of handgun Garcia had bought in Indiana in March 2013.
By July 2013, Omaha police were monitoring Garcia's phone, and FBI agents and Omaha officers traveled to Terre Haute to watch him and arrest him. He had already left for southern Illinois. Agents found his car outside a hotel in Salem, Illinois, and checked into a hotel with a view of it. When an agent woke shortly before the 5 a.m. surveillance shift on July 15, the car was gone. Police tracking showed Garcia heading south on Interstate 57, and agents found the car near Benton, Illinois. The Illinois State Police stopped him in Union County at about 6:30 a.m., and FBI agents arrested him.
Police said he appeared to be intoxicated and had a .45-caliber handgun. CBS News reported that a crowbar and a sledgehammer were also in the car. So were a shoulder bag and a laboratory coat bearing the logo of Louisiana State University. Investigators had theorized that he might be headed to Louisiana to harm people connected with its medical school. He was taken first to Jonesboro, Illinois, where he appeared before a judge, and then to Omaha.
Searches of his home in Terre Haute and his parents' home in California followed. According to CBS News, detectives found the Creighton termination letter and his evaluations in his sink, and a list with phrases including "Invade rich house, torture, murder." Prosecutors also said he had searched online for the Shakespeare line "If you harm us, shall I not revenge?"
After the arrest, Omaha detectives visited the club in Terre Haute and interviewed its staff. Hoffmann told Detective Ryan Davis what Garcia had said to her the previous November.
Garcia was charged with four counts of first-degree murder, four weapons counts and one count of attempted burglary at the Bewtra home. At a preliminary hearing on August 14, 2013, Mois testified about the phone and tablet searches, the credit card records and Hoffmann's account, and said a DNA swab of the Bewtra door did not rule Garcia out. Defense attorney Robert Motta noted that no DNA linked Garcia to the killings and that investigators could not say for certain what day the Brumbacks died. Judge Darryl Lowe sent the case to trial.
The case took three more years to reach a jury. Garcia was represented by a Chicago family firm, Robert Motta Sr., Robert Motta Jr. and Alison Motta, admitted in Nebraska with local counsel. In February 2014 his lawyers raised concerns about his competency. He was sent to the Lincoln Regional Center and found competent in May 2014, a finding supported by the state's evaluator and a defense expert. In August 2015 he alleged that correctional officers had sexually assaulted him; jail officials found the claims unsubstantiated, and he was evaluated again. In January 2016 the state's psychologist testified that Garcia was not delusional and suggested he was malingering, and a defense expert also found him competent.
A further dispute concerned Hoffmann. In June 2015 Steve Yahnke, a private investigator working for the defense, visited her and asked whether she would recant. According to an Indiana State Patrol affidavit later summarized by the Nebraska Supreme Court, Hoffmann said he presented a badge and she first took him for an Omaha detective, and that in a later phone call Alison Motta told her people would not believe her. Hoffmann said she agreed to sign a recantation but never did. In April 2016 the trial court revoked Alison Motta's permission to appear in the case. Garcia wrote to the court that he did not want her as his lawyer, and the Nebraska Supreme Court dismissed the appeals over her removal in May 2016.
Jury selection began in late September 2016 before Douglas County District Judge Gary Randall, and opening statements were given on October 3. "This is a case about revenge," Deputy County Attorney Brenda Beadle told the jury. "This is a man whose life was spiraling into disaster, and he blamed Creighton." Robert Motta Sr. called the State's case a loosely woven collection of circumstantial evidence and said no witness would put Garcia at the Hunter house.
Over about 15 days the State called more than 50 witnesses. William Hunter described finding the bodies. Officer Derek Mois walked the jury through the Hunter house and testified that he believed Thomas had been killed first. The Dundee neighbors described the man and the CR-V, but none of them identified Garcia. Bewtra and Hunter testified about the residency. A forensic analyst testified that DNA on the Bewtra doorknob did not exclude Garcia, though she said it also could not exclude about 1 in 12 Hispanic Americans; DNA from the knives at the Hunter house did not include Garcia. Hoffmann testified that Garcia had told her he killed "an old lady and a boy," and that she felt harassed by the defense team's approach to her.
The defense offered other explanations. It argued that Sherman, not Thomas, had been the target in 2008, pointing to leaves on the boy's socks as a sign he had run outside, and to a restraining order Sherman had obtained against her daughter's former boyfriend. It tried to connect the case to the November 2007 killing of Joy Blanchard in Omaha, for which Garcia was never a suspect. It presented a letter of recommendation Hunter had written for Garcia after the firing and noted that four or five other residents had been dismissed in the same period. A defense expert, relying on rigor mortis, put the Brumbacks' deaths later than May 12, when Garcia was in West Des Moines. "They want to talk about journals and FaceTime," Robert Motta Jr. said in closing. "I want to talk about science." Beadle answered with the receipt: "I'm sure the wings at Wing Stop are good, but are they so good that you'd come all the way from Indiana for them?"
Garcia did not testify. On October 26, 2016, after about six to seven hours of deliberation over two days, the jury convicted him on every count. Two days later the same jury found aggravating circumstances that made him eligible for death: for Thomas Hunter and Shirlee Sherman, that each murder was especially cruel or showed exceptional depravity under the statute's wording, and that another murder was committed at the same time; for the Brumbacks, those two findings and a third, that the killings were committed to conceal the identity of the perpetrator.
The penalty phase was delayed for nearly two years. Garcia stopped talking to his lawyers and his family. At a March 2017 hearing he was brought into court by force and did not answer the judge's questions. He was evaluated a third time and found competent for sentencing on March 24, 2017. The Mottas withdrew, and the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy took over his defense.
The mitigation hearing began in June 2018. Garcia was wheeled into court with a heavy beard and uncombed hair, wore no shoes or socks, and appeared to sleep through the proceedings. His lawyer, Jeff Pickens, presented records intended to show depression since childhood, alcoholism and intrusive thoughts of hurting people, and argued that weak residency programs had taken him on to fill slots. "There's a cruelty built into this case in that Mr. Garcia was set up to fail," Pickens said.
On September 14, 2018, a three-judge panel sentenced him to death on each of the four murders. As he read the decision, Judge Randall stopped, said he was in pain and was taken from the courtroom by medics; District Judge Rick Schreiner completed the panel's written sentence. The panel found only one statutory mitigating circumstance, that Garcia had no significant criminal history. He also received prison terms on the weapons and attempted burglary counts.
Shirlee Sherman's son said: "Mr. Garcia doesn't deserve my forgiveness." Garcia's brother, Fernando, said the family prayed for the victims' families and hoped they would find closure. Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said: "We know that he's never going to get out to hurt anybody else."
The death sentences brought an automatic appeal to the Nebraska Supreme Court. Garcia's lawyers raised 130 assignments of error in 15 areas, from the traffic stop and search warrants to Hoffmann's testimony, competency, DNA and digital evidence, and the constitutionality of the death penalty. On September 8, 2023, in State v. Garcia, 315 Neb. 74, written by Chief Justice Michael Heavican, the court affirmed the convictions and the death sentences. It found two errors in the penalty phase: the concealment aggravator overlapped with the multiple-murder aggravator for the Brumbacks, and the jury was wrongly instructed on "mental anguish." It held both harmless and found the sentences proportionate. It also said it could not decide on direct appeal several claims that trial counsel was ineffective, including whether they discussed a plea offer with him, his right to testify and an insanity defense, and how they handled alternate suspects. Those claims can be raised in a later postconviction proceeding.
While that appeal was pending, Garcia filed a motion for new trial in October 2022. He said prison staff had begun forcibly medicating him in January 2019 for a serious mental illness, that his hygiene and behavior had improved afterward, and that he had been diagnosed with profound hearing loss in September 2020. He argued that this showed he may have been incompetent at trial and sentencing. The district court denied the motion. On December 20, 2024, in State v. Garcia, 318 Neb. 228, the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed, finding that evidence of his response to medication years later did not show that he lacked competency in 2016 or 2018.
As of October 2026, Garcia remains under sentence of death in Nebraska. The Nebraska Supreme Court's opinion listings through early October 2026 show no further decision in his case after December 2024, and no execution date has been reported. The ineffective-assistance claims left open in 2023 are the kind usually pursued in state postconviction proceedings and then in federal habeas corpus; no ruling in either was found. Nebraska carried out its most recent execution in August 2018, when Carey Dean Moore died by lethal injection.
The killings left their mark on Creighton's pathology department, which lost a former chairman and a faculty member's son, and on two Omaha neighborhoods. Dundee neighbors said in 2016 that the verdict gave some relief but not closure. Shirlee Sherman's brother Bradley Waite said before the sentencing, "Today will not be the last chapter, we know that." The Bewtras later learned how close Garcia's searches had come to their own family.
The case also drew attention to how a physician with a record of dismissals moved from program to program for more than a decade. Brumback's January 2013 letter to Indiana regulators described the Creighton firing in detail, and Indiana declined to license Garcia that year. Prosecutors argued that such refusals fed his anger. The record does not show that anyone saw a danger of violence.
Garcia never confessed to police. The statement to Hoffmann is the only admission in the record. The defense attacked her credibility and her drug use at the time, and she agreed to recant in 2015 before testifying consistently with her original account.
No witness identified Garcia at the Hunter house, and DNA from the Hunter scene did not include him. The 2008 convictions rest on the description and car, the motive, the similarity to the 2013 crimes, and the statement to Hoffmann.
The defense argued that Shirlee Sherman was the intended target in 2008 and pointed to other possible suspects, including other dismissed residents and Sherman's son-in-law, and to the 2007 Joy Blanchard killing. None was charged. In 2013 Chief Schmaderer said the boy and the housekeeper were probably not the intended targets.
The date of the Brumback killings was contested. The State relied on the video and the journal; the defense expert relied on rigor mortis.
Dates differ among sources: the firing is given as 2001 by most and 2000 in one passage of the 2023 opinion; one AP report puts the Bewtra break-in on May 10, 2013, while the trial evidence put the tablet search on May 10 and the break-in on May 12.
Garcia's mental state remains disputed. Three court evaluations found him competent, and the State's evaluator suggested malingering; the defense presented evidence of long-standing depression, and prison staff later medicated him involuntarily for a serious mental illness.
1999: Resigns first residency in Utica, New York, after complaints.
July 2000: Begins pathology residency at Creighton University, Omaha.
2001: Dismissed; termination letter signed by William Hunter and Roger Brumback.
2003: Resident at the University of Illinois Hospital; Illinois license.
2005: Files for bankruptcy.
February 2008: Louisiana denies his medical license; LSU residency ends February 28.
March 13, 2008: Thomas Hunter, 11, and Shirlee Sherman, 57, killed in Dundee, Omaha.
2012: Case featured on "America's Most Wanted."
About November 2012: Garcia tells Cecilia Hoffmann he killed "an old lady and a boy."
January 2013: Brumback writes to Indiana's licensing agency; Garcia's temporary Indiana license expires.
March 2013: Buys a handgun in Indiana.
May 12, 2013: Attempted break-in at the Bewtra home; Roger and Mary Brumback killed.
May 14, 2013: The Brumbacks are found.
May 20, 2013: Omaha police announce a task force with the FBI.
July 15, 2013: Garcia arrested on Interstate 57 in Union County, Illinois.
August 14, 2013: Preliminary hearing; case bound over for trial.
May 2014 and January 2016: Found competent to stand trial.
April 2016: Alison Motta removed from the case.
October 3, 2016: Opening statements.
October 26, 2016: Convicted on all counts.
October 28, 2016: Jury finds aggravating circumstances.
March 24, 2017: Found competent for sentencing.
June 2018: Mitigation hearing.
September 14, 2018: Sentenced to death on four counts.
January 2019: Involuntary medication begins in prison.
October 2022: Files motion for new trial.
September 8, 2023: Nebraska Supreme Court affirms convictions and death sentences.
December 20, 2024: Nebraska Supreme Court affirms denial of new trial.
October 2026: Remains under sentence of death.