Jonathan Garcia-Valladares (7 of Diamonds, Arizona)

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Our card this week is Jonathan Garcia Valladaris, the seven of diamonds from Arizona.

Being a 13-year-old is hard for most people, but for Jonathan, it seemed like he was close to nailing it.

He was about to finish eighth grade and had his sight set on a special charter high school that focused on the sciences.

He wanted to be a surgeon when he grew up, and it wouldn't have been a stretch.

Jonathan was an excellent student, top of his class.

He was the kind of kid who wanted to do his very best at everything, including the school football team that he had just joined.

Although, somehow, one of the very first runs he took to get in shape for that football team was the exact thing that cut his dreams short.

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Phoenix 911, where you're shot in front of my house.

What happened?

The woman was shot in front of my house.

He's laying in the street on movie.

Did you see who shot him?

What's that?

No, no, it's.

He went 26th Street.

Hardy.

Those are the sounds that startled Tim Stevens awake in the early hours on November 7th, 2010.

His immediate reaction?

Firecrackers.

But no, he thought, who sets off firecrackers in November?

And then it hit him.

Someone could be in serious danger.

And here's the thing.

Tim was a Navy search and rescue veteran.

He had been trained to respond in times of trouble.

I mean, I think that's sort of my, even still, if there's an accident, I usually instinctively, I move towards the accident instead of away from it, you know, or whatever, to see if I can help.

First few minutes of being awake, I've got my dog in my arm, I'm probably in my bare feet or flip-flops at the very most.

Even if Tim had been trained for this sort of emergency, it was the last thing he expected to happen on that crisp fall morning in Phoenix.

Tim, who worked as a systems engineer for IBM, had moved to the Camelback East Village neighborhood only a few days ago.

He had a bunch of work done on the place and finally got to spend his first weekend in the newly remodeled home.

He was looking forward to sleeping in.

The weather was perfect.

So, Tim and his wife had all of the windows flung open, enjoying the breeze.

When he heard the noises and grabbed his small dog that he took everywhere, and then he rushed out of the house.

I come around the corner, there's some commotion going on that I can't quite remember exactly, but there were some people on the porch that I remember.

And then to see that child sitting there, lifeless, sitting in a pool of blood.

The scene was shocking and also strange.

Tim remembered that something fell off and then it clicked.

Where were the cops?

I just, I went towards the boy to check him out.

I just thought he might still be alive and I checked his vitals and he had no pulse whatsoever.

And by then, there was a cop down the street.

He was at the very end of the street.

And I stood up and I'm like, here's where the problem is.

The officer frantically waved Tim towards him, away from from what was clearly becoming a crime scene and towards the officer's car and he didn't say anything he just said we need you out of this area tim got in the police car but he was still confused why was everyone hanging back it just was odd to me that they didn't sort of rush in i guess there's a reason the cops weren't rushing to the victim By this time, several neighbors had called 911 reporting the same thing.

Gunshots.

More specifically, multiple gunshots.

The police responded quickly and they had absolutely no idea what they were walking into.

But two words came to mind.

Active shooter.

Police moved toward the victim cautiously, each behind their own shield that protects against gunfire.

Detective Dominic Rostenberg explained what was found at the scene.

As I approached, I could see that it's a younger Hispanic male.

He didn't have any identification on him.

He was dressed in athletic attire, running shoes, red running shorts, a hoodie.

He was unresponsive.

He was bleeding profusely from the head.

It was later learned that he was shot four times, two in the left cheek and two at the ear.

Police eventually realized that there was no active shooter in the area, but instead, just a teenager who had been shot in the head four times.

Without even knowing who this boy was yet, he was pronounced dead at the scene.

And in short order, police rushed to Cordon off the immediate area so that they could begin an investigation.

So the police contacting witness, certainly making sure this shooter or if shooters aren't still in the area, so we're still using caution.

Once we realize that the scene is safe, then we start preserving the scene, which is hanging crime scene tape, contacting witnesses, separating them so they don't contaminate their testimonies.

kind of holding the area, preserving evidence.

A report shows that police spoke to about 10 witnesses who heard the gunshots from their homes and a few who even reported seeing the victim.

One witness called in saying that he saw a man walking from the crime scene.

The guy didn't appear to be in a hurry and the witness tried to follow the man but lost him and police never knew if it was someone involved or another potential witness who might have information.

And then there was this account.

One witness said that he'd been woken up by his wife who heard the gunshots.

And the couple reported hearing two people, one that sounded like a woman's voice saying, get in the car, followed by what was described as a man's voice that said, get in the effing car.

They reported hearing the car peel away at a high speed, but they, nor any of the other witnesses police would end up speaking to, actually saw those two people.

And that was it.

No one else heard or saw anything useful.

We have a young victim.

He's shot several times in the head.

We have limited forensic evidence.

We have no video.

We had no cell phone data.

The investigators immediately recognize that this is a tough case.

By the time the sun was high in the desert sky, Phoenix Police Department at least had one lead.

A call had come in that ID'd their victim.

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A woman named Ruth, who lived about a fourth of a mile from where the shooting happened, called police that morning to report her 13-year-old son missing.

She said that he had gone out for a jog that morning in the Camelback East Village neighborhood, but he'd never come home.

And they couldn't find him when they went looking for him along his jogging route.

She began to describe her son, his dark curly hair, dark eyes.

She said that he would have been wearing glasses, red gym shorts, a white t-shirt topped with a navy blue zip-up hoodie.

And that's when they started to piece it all together.

Detectives responded out to her house and spoke to her, and they were able to determine based on the physical description and the clothing worn that that was her son, Jonathan, who was deceased at the scene.

This is the worst possible news that any parent could get.

And Ruth was hearing that she had just lost her oldest son months after the family had moved to what she believed would be a safe neighborhood.

But why?

Why would someone choose to murder a 13-year-old kid?

It's a question even his mom was asking because she and her son were very close and she never saw or heard anything from Jonathan that could have foreshadowed his death.

I remember when I, you know, speaking to

Vallardis, she just explained how close they were.

And she gave me an example of how she got her hair done.

She had a hair appointment and her son actually went into the office at the school just to call her to see how her hair turned out.

It just shows you how sweet he was and how much he cared about his family just to ask his mom, I bet you look so beautiful.

I can't wait to see your hair when I come home.

I just started, it was just so sad to hear that.

He's just a sweet, innocent boy, 13 years old, his whole life ahead of him, just be wiped out for no reason whatsoever.

It's just, it's horrible.

It's just a tragic situation.

A typical weekend in the Valladaris home might look something like the night before Jonathan's murder.

Ruth told the Washington Post that she and her family had gone to the movie theater to see the animated movie Mega Mind.

And afterwards, she and Jonathan playfully debated the color of suit that he would wear to his middle school graduation.

He wanted to wear green.

Jonathan Garcia Valladaris was an A student.

He was a chess player, he was in choir, and when he grew up, he wanted to be a surgeon.

He had just joined his middle school's football team, and he had a loving family.

Here is one of Jonathan's former middle school teachers.

His name is Jason Bourne, and yes, that's his real name.

You know, obviously, it's a city with certain crimes.

So there were gangs in the neighborhood.

We got to know the parents really, really well.

And the parents were really just hardworking parents that wanted the best for our kids.

He remembered that even though Jonathan's family had just moved there in the last few months, he was finding his place at Larry C.

Kennedy.

He was pretty new to us, but he fit in really well.

He was a part of the football team that was kind of eighth graders.

It's a big deal for them to be on the football team.

And so he was a part of that.

I know he was in kind of a higher academic grouping.

So a lot of his friends, a lot of the kids that he really would have connected with, kids who were higher achievers.

And because Jonathan was such a high achiever, he wanted to do well in this new sport that he'd just taken up.

So that's why he started jogging.

One of the very first runs he went on was the one that would be his last.

Investigators set out to learn more about Jonathan.

outside of the accolades that his mom and teacher had volunteered.

They spoke to a schoolmate of Jonathan's who said that he had heard a rumor that Jonathan was killed during an attempted robbery.

That schoolmate also told police about an incident unrelated to Jonathan where he witnessed a kid in the middle of an argument take off his shirt, yell Southside posse and walk away.

Now, the Southside Posse was a gang that was active in the area.

And while authorities knew that Jonathan didn't have ties to any gangs and he didn't have a criminal record, they did wonder, could his death have been gang related?

But the thing is, there was no one police could find who had any conflict with Jonathan.

He hadn't made any mention to family or friends that he was scared of anyone, or even that he had an issue with another person, like a school bully.

And his family life was good.

Ruth and her husband, Jonathan's stepdad Isak, were both vetted, and they were fully cooperative with law enforcement and were cleared of any involvement in the shooting.

And it should be noted that Jonathan's birth father died a few years prior.

So as authorities grappled with why someone would target Jonathan, they wondered if maybe he wasn't targeted at all.

Maybe this was just a random act of violence or a crime of opportunity.

But even that idea made little sense to detectives.

Detective Rostenberg described the area to us specifically as a middle-class neighborhood.

He said that a shooting taking place there was very rare.

And here's Tim again, the neighbor who tried to save Jonathan.

I just bought this house.

I just moved into this house two days, and now there's a dead boy that was shot, you know, two doors down.

Like, what the hell's going on here?

Well, and everybody told me, like, this is nothing.

Nothing like this has ever happened before.

This is very unusual.

But even still, I've been in the house three days, you know.

Detective Rostenberg told us there were no child abductions in the area at the time and that Jonathan was found fully dressed with no signs of sexual assault.

He didn't even have any injuries to suggest there had been a struggle, like if someone were trying to get him in a car or something.

He was shot and fell to the ground as his shooter fled the area.

Random crimes in this neighborhood might not have been common, but that's what this was looking like.

Though there was a little more that the autopsy provided.

There was stippling on his left hand, the back of his left hand.

So basically stipling is the patter of gunshot residue.

So we believe Jonathan maybe had his left hand up covering his face as he was shot.

It's also indicative of close range, of him being shot from close range.

Two of the bullets entered his left cheek and two of the bullets were in close proximity to his left ear.

That's so sad that he must have been like trying to protect him.

Yeah, he must have been just like this.

This information told investigators that the shooter was two or three feet, maybe even closer range to Jonathan when he was shot with.22 caliber bullets.

Interestingly, even though Jonathan was shot four times, six.22 caliber bullet casings were recovered when they did a sweep of the scene, meaning that at least two shots missed probably forced the shooter to get closer and closer.

Close enough that they may have even touched Jonathan.

The pockets being turned out, was that something that was noticed right away?

Yeah, when detectives get out there, we're trained to look for things like that.

We're certainly always looking, you know, to determine a motive.

So when you see, that's not typically how somebody would wear their pants, obviously.

So when you see that, not necessarily that it's a robbery, but it can be indicative of a robbery or robbery attempt.

We know that Jonathan didn't leave the house with much.

He didn't have a wallet or a phone or really anything of value.

So those pockets were probably empty before the shooter turned them inside out.

Despite interviewing more people and attempting to test what little evidence they had for touch DNA and even making pleas to the public for information, Jonathan's case stalled before it ever gained any real traction.

It wasn't until Detective Rostenberg got assigned to the case in 2015 that things started to pick up again.

And right away, he honed in on something important.

Even though the shooter hadn't taken anything with them when they'd reached into Jonathan's pockets, they did leave something behind.

Something that maybe now could be the key to cracking this case wide open.

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So when I got involved in 2015 and part of my review process is again, like searching like who would want to hurt Jonathan.

So that's when going through the crime scene photos and the evidence, I again confirmed that it appeared that Jonathan's pants shorts pockets had been pulled out.

They had previously been tested for DNA, but the technology that we had in 2010 is obviously different from the technology that we have now.

So I identified that while speaking with the lab, our crime lab, that there appear to be mixed profiles in Jonathan's pockets.

So I'm cautiously optimistic, if you will, that with additional testing and advancements in DNA technology, that may eventually lead to something.

When Detective Rostenberg talked about a mixed profile, he means is that there were two DNA profiles together, one of which they deemed major and one minor.

The major profile belonged to Jonathan, but at the time, the technology wasn't good enough to separate out the minor one to make any determinations about the contributor.

Now, Jonathan's DNA being in there makes sense, of course, right?

Like those were Jonathan's shorts.

But the other profile, that one was more likely than not their killers.

And that is what they need to identify.

Since 2015, Detective Rossenberg had played the waiting game, checking back every couple of years to see if the technology was better.

And those years may as well have been a lifetime in terms of technology.

So it took about five years.

But in 2020, the Phoenix Police Department's labs got new equipment.

outfitted with new technology that could actually separate those mixed profiles.

Now, it was still gonna have to be a bit of a waiting game because there was a backlog of cases.

And Detective Rossenberg had been waiting for another couple of years.

But finally, on April 4th, 2025, after our team started digging into this case, the lab request was sent back.

And those mixed samples are being processed as I speak.

DNA backlogs are a real issue for law enforcement departments across the country.

Phoenix currently has approximately 2,300 unsolved homicide cases dating back to the 70s.

Even so, Detective Rossenberg said that he is optimistic that the results will come back in the next few months.

And our team made him aware of Season of Justice in case he has any more cases in need of advanced or expedited testing.

For those of you new to the deck or me or AudioChuck, Season of Justice is a nonprofit I founded back in 2020 when I saw a gap in the system.

So often, the only thing standing in the way of a case getting solved or not is money.

Sending things to an outside lab is expensive.

And forget the newer stuff like investigative genetic genealogy.

Science moves a whole lot faster than law and departments don't have that budgeted.

And even if they did, for how many cases?

With the support of our Crime Junkie fan club and the advertisers on our shows like this one, we can help bridge that gap.

So this is my friendly reminder to listen to and support the advertisers on this show because they they help us fund nonprofits like Season of Justice.

SOJ is separate from our media organization and it's run by a board of directors.

And the grant process is the easiest thing ever.

I literally had a retired detective help design it because I didn't want red tape and paperwork getting in the way of solving cold cases.

So all that to say, we gave that information to Detective Rostenberg, but I want to make sure that all of you know the ins and outs of that organization as well, because I know a lot of people in law enforcement and a lot of people who know people in law enforcement listen to this show.

So be sure to spread the word.

The website is seasonofjustice.org.

And if you're so inclined, you can even make a tax-deductible donation on the website as well.

Even a couple of bucks goes a long way if our large community comes together.

I'm going to put the link in the show notes.

In all that time that Detective Rostenberg has been waiting for the technology to advance and for this to get tested, no tips have come into the silent witness program or to Detective Rostenberg.

So for now, we're playing the waiting game.

Detective Rostenberg is hopeful that those pockets are going to lead to a suspect.

That, and he's hopeful that someone hearing this may come forward.

I am at least optimistic that, you know, with this new testing, that we're going to get something good.

And somebody's going to have to explain why there are DNAs in a 13-year-old boy's pockets after he may may have been robbed and shot several times in the head.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And this is something that I would assume is like exactly what you hope to have in a cold case, is something that you can kind of like hold on to as technology evolves.

Absolutely.

And that's one of the great things, you know, great part of this job is just because even, you know, 10 years ago, five years ago, even, you know, you go back 20 years and it's just moving in the right direction.

It's just getting better and better and better, especially DNA, the way we collect DNA, the way we process DNA, the results we're getting from DNA, fingerprints, ballistics.

Our reporters, Taylor and Annie, tried getting in touch with Jonathan's parents.

They tried contacting those who attended his funeral and wrote on his obituary wall as well.

They texted and called every number, but so far we haven't heard back.

And it feels as if not only Jonathan is gone, but everyone else around him.

But this doesn't mean that he's forgotten.

Jason, Jonathan's teacher, vividly remembered the last time he spoke with Jonathan.

The eighth grader was already planning what he was going to study the next year.

He had applied for, it was a charter school that was kind of focused on biology, if I remember correct.

It was a science-oriented school.

So he would talk about kind of the dreams of furthering his education and getting into career.

Looking back, I remembered the last time I saw him, I had to sign something for him or give him a letter.

It might have been a letter of recommendation for this biology school.

But he and his friend had come by after school to pick up this letter.

And he kind of made a joke of, someday you'll see my name.

I'll be famous.

I'll remember you, Mr.

Bourne.

And it's kind of chilling when you kind of think back.

But that was the last time I saw him.

That was the last thing he said.

He was definitely one who thought about the future.

He had dreams.

He was very, very friendly.

The kids, they really connected with him.

And even though he was new to the school, Jonathan's classmates made a point to remember him.

It came up often.

Kids would kind of mention him in poems that they had written, or when we would talk about prepping for the promotion, kind of always remembering him.

The football season continued and a number of students kind of made it a point to go to every game and they wore his number either on their cheek face painting or wrote it on their t-shirts.

So he really kind of shaped the year.

Jonathan's classmates kept a seat empty for him at the eighth grade graduation, the one where he wanted to wear green.

Tim Stevens, the neighbor who found Jonathan just yards from his new home, still lives in that same house.

He's been there for about 15 years and he's become friends with his neighbors and none of them have forgotten about this case.

Tim said that it's just a part of the fabric now of their community.

It's always there.

It's always accompanied with, you know, when I think of my first stepping into this house, which I love this house.

I love everything about it.

And I've been playing with and building and remodeling and landscaping this house for 15 years.

I do love, but my very first week was a tough one.

You know, sobering, very sobering moment.

And this case haunts Detective Rostenberg.

I have Jonathan's photograph or a newspaper article at my desk that I look at every day.

And just thankful when I go home and see my kids at this.

It could have easily have been one of my kids.

He's exercising.

He wants to get in shape for the football team.

He had no gang ties, no issues with anyone, no unpaid debts.

He was doing great in school.

And he just leaves his home to go for a quick, short jog to get in shape for the football team.

And he's shot four times in the head.

It's just the brutality of it, the viciousness of it.

It just stuck with me.

If you know anything about the murder of Jonathan Garcia Valladares in Phoenix, Arizona on November 7th, 2010, it's time to come forward.

You can contact Detective Rostenberg or anyone at the Phoenix Police Department during the day at 602-495-5883.

And at night, you can call 602-262-6141.

And if you want to remain anonymous, you can put your tip in through Silent Witness at 480-948-6377.

There's also a toll-free line, a text number, and the website where you can submit tips as well.

And we're gonna have all of that information in the show notes.

The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

So what do you think, Chuck?

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