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Former Doctor Anthony Garcia Convicted of Four Omaha Revenge Killings

An Omaha jury found him guilty of killing an 11-year-old boy, a housekeeper, a Creighton pathologist and his wife, years after his 2001 firing.

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A man in a dark overcoat carrying a briefcase climbs the granite steps of a columned courthouse, autumn leaves on the steps

It took a Douglas County jury six hours over two days. On Wednesday, October 26, 2016, it found Anthony Garcia, 42, a former doctor from Terre Haute, Indiana, guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in the revenge killings of four people tied to the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha. Garcia, in a gray suit, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read. A couple of rows behind him his mother sobbed quietly.

The first two died in 2008. Thomas Hunter, 11, the son of Dr. William Hunter, a Creighton pathology faculty member, and the family's housekeeper, Shirlee Sherman, 57, were stabbed to death in the Hunters' home in an upscale Omaha neighborhood. Neighbors had seen an olive-skinned man in the area and at the Hunters' door, and a silver Honda CR-V with out-of-state plates, but the killings went unsolved for five years. Then, on Mother's Day 2013, another Creighton pathologist, Dr. Roger Brumback, and his wife, Mary, were killed in their Omaha home. The police saw at once that the stab wounds were strikingly similar to those on Thomas and Shirlee Sherman, and a task force was formed to find what connected the two houses.

What connected them was a firing. In 2001 Hunter and Brumback had dismissed Garcia from Creighton's pathology residency program. Prosecutors said he blamed them for telling other medical schools, which kept him out of several programs and cost him medical licenses in other states, and that his rage had simmered for years. Credit card purchases and phone records put him in and around Omaha on May 12, 2013, the day the Brumbacks died; their address had been searched on his smartphone that day; and he was linked to an attempted break-in at the home of another Creighton pathology doctor hours earlier. In 2008, the police found, he had driven the same kind of Honda, registered in Louisiana, where he then lived. He was arrested on a southern Illinois highway about two months after the Brumback killings.

His Chicago defense team attacked the handling of the evidence and the honesty of an exotic dancer who testified that Garcia once told her he "had killed a young boy and old woman." The jury convicted him on the murder counts, on four counts of using a weapon to commit a felony and on a count arising from the attempted break-in. "Our justice system worked today," said Mike Sherman, Shirlee's former husband and the father of their children. "With what they had, the jury made their decision," said the defense attorney Robert Motta Jr., who promised an appeal. "It was a tough case."

Garcia now faced life in prison or death, and the choice was not only the court's. Nebraska voters were to decide on November 8 whether to keep the state's death penalty. The same jury was to return that Friday to decide whether aggravating circumstances existed, with any death sentence then resting on the unanimous vote of a three-judge panel.

The jury found those circumstances. After a mitigation hearing that began in June 2018, a sentencing panel sentenced Garcia to death on each of the four murders, and the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed his convictions and sentences in 2023.

What this story covers. The verdict, the deliberations, the scene in court, the victims, the 2008 witnesses and car, the link between the cases, the motive as prosecutors described it, the phone and card records, the attempted break-in, the arrest, the defense case, the quotations, the referendum and the penalty procedure come from the Associated Press report by Margery A. Beck of October 26, 2016. The aggravation finding, the 2018 death sentences and the 2023 affirmance come from the Nebraska Supreme Court's opinion in State v. Garcia, 318 Neb. 228 (December 20, 2024). The motive is the prosecution's account, which the jury accepted; Garcia did not admit it.

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