7 SEPTEMBER 4-10, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Years after her childhood best friend was murdered, Selina Maestas sat outside the suspected killer’s home. Maestas watched silently as Mario Raymond Sanchez walked in and out of the small, tan brick house on a residential street in Commerce City, observ- ing from afar as he continued living his life... while her friend’s life had ended. Even now, investigators accuse Sanchez of murdering Alicia Marie Tverberg. He was arrested in connection with the crime in January 2020, a month after the 21-year- old woman was found fatally shot inside a stranger’s Adams County apartment the day after Christmas 2019. But Sanchez was never charged with Tverberg’s death, nor were any other suspects. Almost six years later, Tverberg’s case has gone cold. “To this day, I have not been able to rest. I really thought we had him,” Maestas says. “I’ve considered going up [to Sanchez’s home] and risking my life to get a confession out of him. I just never did.” The 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Of- fi ce declined to fi le charges against Sanchez a week after his arrest, pending further in- vestigation. But the case’s co-lead detective, Adams County Sergeant Andrew Martinez, says the investigation was exhausted long ago, and he claims it led them directly to Sanchez. The discovery of the murder weapon, fi ngerprints at the crime scene and digital data like social media activity and cell phone pings all implicate Sanchez in the murder, according to an arrest affi davit for Sanchez from 2020. But because multiple people were present when Tverberg was killed, and none of them identifi ed the shooter, Martinez says prosecutors feared they couldn’t prove be- yond a reasonable doubt that it was Sanchez who pulled the trigger. “I was confi dent going in that we had the person, and I’m still confi dent that we had the person in custody,” Martinez says. “With the case that we had, I would have liked to have seen it go to trial. ...I feel that it would’ve been better to go to trial and have a jury de- cide whether the evidence was suffi cient.” The DA’s offi ce rejected interview re- quests from Westword, citing concerns that discussing the case could jeopardize a future prosecution. But the possibility of a future prosecution seems slim. Spokesperson Chris Hopper says that in 2020, the DA’s offi ce assigned an inter- nal investigator to the case who remains “committed to following any new evidence that warrants further review.” According to Martinez, the case was reviewed multiple times by different detectives with the Adams County Sheriff’s Offi ce, most recently in early 2024, but they yielded no new paths forward. For Tverberg’s loved ones, hope for justice is dwindling. Her mother, Irene Gonzales, says she had regular meetings with the DA’s offi ce for three years, but there was never any progress to report. She has pushed investiga- tors, collected her own evidence and offered a $10,000 reward for information about her daughter’s murder. Nothing has worked. “They had told me they know who did this and it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Gonzales says of the DA’s offi ce. “But here we are, fi ve years later, and nothing’s happened. That’s a hell of a marathon.” One Body, Three Suspects After spending a month in jail, an Adams County man returned home on the evening of December 26, 2019, to fi nd his front door ajar. Though he lived alone and had been gone for weeks, his apartment on Galen Court was now in disarray, littered with beer bottles, used cigarettes and trash. The party house transformed into a grisly crime scene when he entered his bedroom. Lying on the ground beside his bed was the body of an unknown young woman. She had been dead for at MONIKA SWIDERSKI continued on page 8
