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Illinois Troopers Arrest Dr. Anthony Garcia, Charged in Four Omaha Killings Tied to Creighton's Pathology Department

Omaha's police chief said Garcia fit the elements of a serial killer. Among the victims were a professor who had fired him and the son of another.

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Illustration of a traffic stop on a rural highway beside a cornfield, with two cars pulled onto the shoulder. Not an actual scene from the case.

Four people tied to Creighton University's pathology department were killed in Omaha in 2008 and 2013. On July 15, 2013, police arrested Anthony Garcia, a doctor fired from his residency there.

Illinois State Police arrested Garcia, 40, a physician from Terre Haute, Indiana, during a traffic stop that Monday morning in Union County, Illinois, before a SWAT team could carry out a planned search of his home the next day. Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer announced that Garcia had been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and use of a weapon to commit a felony, and said he "fits the elements of a serial killer." Garcia was held in the Jackson County Jail in Murphysboro, Illinois, and appeared before an Illinois judge the next day. A task force of local, state and federal officers had been formed in May to investigate the killings and whether they were connected.

The victims were Thomas Hunter, the son of pathologist William Hunter, and the family's housekeeper, Shirlee Sherman, killed in 2008 in an Omaha neighborhood blocks from Warren Buffett's home, and pathology professor Roger Brumback and his wife, Mary, killed in their Omaha home in May 2013. Garcia had been a pathology resident at Creighton in 2000 and 2001 and was fired by Hunter and Brumback for erratic behavior, police said; he was later denied medical licenses in at least two states. A jury later convicted him of the four murders, and he was sentenced to death.

The two attacks came five years apart, yet both struck the two Creighton doctors who had fired Garcia from his residency, one directly and one through his family.

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