Irvine police found a beaten, burned body in a business parking lot in 2009. At the time, though they found suspect DNA beneath her fingernails, detectives couldn't identify the victim.
Investigators say they now know it was 14-year-old Marcia Shirree Thomas, a missing girl from Reno.
“As you can imagine, technology has rapidly changed in the area of DNA," Irvine PD spokesperson Kyle Oldoerp told 2 News Nevada. "The victim’s DNA was entered into a database, and really this was an amazing collaboration through local and federal partners over years of not giving up on this case."
Oldoerp said that detectives suspect that Thomas left Reno as a teenager and made her way to Southern California.
In 2010, over a year after Thomas's killing, police found a suspect DNA match and charged two brothers in her death, Zenaido Valdivia-Guzman and Gabino Valdivia-Guzman.
Detectives allege that the brothers picked Thomas up in Santa Ana, California, kidnapping her, assaulting her, and driving her to an industrial business park in Irvine where they doused her body in gasoline and lit her on fire.
A jury convicted Zenaido Valdivia-Guzman of felony first-degree murder in 2022, and he's serving a life sentence for Thomas's death.
The Orange County District Attorney's office told 2 News Nevada that Gabino Valdivia-Guzman's trial is scheduled for November.
Oldoerp says that the police department has contacted Thomas's family.
"While this is very, very sad news, we’re hoping it brings some sort of closure for the family who has been missing their daughter for all these years," Oldoerp said.
