Brandon Rivas-Noriega was 26 when he was last seen on October 3, 2023, driving his mother’s 2015 Ford Focus. His family reported him missing on October 5 after receiving worrying messages from him saying he was in trouble and needed money. Detectives traced the case to a residence on Fanning Drive that Rivas-Noriega frequented.

Searches of the Fanning Drive home recovered the Ford Focus owner’s manual and Rivas-Noriega’s driver’s license, which led investigators to a Rural Hill Road property. Behind an abandoned trailer there they located the reported vehicle; a decomposing body was inside the car’s trunk. An autopsy identified the remains as Brandon Rivas-Noriega and determined the cause of death to be multiple gunshot wounds. Several of his tattoos had been cut from the body.

Police charged 31-year-old Kevin Joel Castro-Garcia with criminal homicide and abuse of a corpse, alleging Rivas-Noriega was shot inside the Fanning Drive residence. Castro-Garcia was already facing an unrelated criminal homicide charge from a September case in which a badly burned body was found in the trunk of a car that had been set on fire. Does anyone who knew Brandon or who was in south Nashville in early October 2023 have information that could help investigators?