Thomas Christopher Tom Hunter was 11 when he was found stabbed to death inside his family’s Omaha home on March 13, 2008. He had just arrived home from school and was described as a normal sixth-grader who liked video games, Dr. Pepper and potato chips. The family’s 57-year-old housekeeper, Shirlee Sherman, was also found stabbed; knives were plunged into the necks of both victims. The discovery was made by Thomas’s father, Dr. William Hunter, a pathologist at Creighton University Medical Center.

The case went cold for years until a May 2013 double homicide of Dr. Roger Brumback and his wife Mary, who had been shot and stabbed, produced similarities investigators considered significant. Both Brumback and Dr. Hunter had been involved in firing a former pathology resident, Anthony Garcia, in 2001. Investigators later linked Garcia to the Brumback killings by cellphone and credit card records and to the Hunter home by witness reports of a man with an olive complexion and a silver Honda CR-V seen nearby in 2008. Garcia was convicted in October 2016 of first-degree murder in the deaths of Thomas, Sherman and the Brumbacks and was later sentenced to death.