A small drop of blood would have been the missing clue to solve the homicide of a Hispanic woman in Texas in 2012 and arrest the alleged perpetrator 14 years later.
Irasema Chávez, a woman originally from Nuevo León, Mexico, was found dead on February 20, 2012 inside her apartment in Arlington, Texas.
According to a Univision story, a relative of Chávez discovered the body, which had more than 100 wounds caused by a knife.
After arriving at the victim’s apartment, the authorities determined that there were no signs of forced entry, so one hypothesis suggested that the Mexican woman knew her attacker.
In Chávez’s apartment, the authorities realized that the television was no longer there and, in the place where it used to be, they found small drops of blood, which were analyzed without obtaining any results that would allow progress in the investigation.
The only result that the analysis showed was that the aggressor was a Hispanic woman.
Years passed and the investigation remained stagnant until, in November 2024, according to Univision, the Arlington Homicide Unit requested the collaboration of the FBI to use a new forensic genetic genealogy technique.
The new test presented results that opened a new line of investigation, which pointed to Mayra Velásquez, a 42-year-old woman, also originally from Nuevo León, who lived in Texas, as the main suspect in Chávez’s homicide.
The authorities would have monitored the suspect during her daily activities until, after a social gathering, the Police obtained samples of Velásquez’s DNA by recovering a fork that she had thrown into the trash.
Comparison of the samples determined that the blood found at the scene matched the DNA obtained from the fork used by Velásquez.
Thus, on July 17 of this year, Velásquez was arrested by the Police and currently remains in prison without the right to bail.