Illinois couple Dr. Susan Brill de Ramirez and Antonio Ramirez Barron, both 63, were last seen alive on Thursday.
An Illinois man who years ago wrote he wanted to kill his parents on a bathroom mirror has been arrested in their deaths, officials said.
Dr. Susan Brill de Ramirez and her husband, Antonio Ramirez Barron, both 63, were last seen alive on Thursday by colleagues, who became concerned when they didn’t come to work the next day at Bradley University.
On Sunday, police discovered their cars at their Princeville home, where several items were missing and it was clear something violent had occurred, Peoria County Sheriff Brian Asbell told reporters.
“There was obvious blood evidence inside the residence, which indicated that some sort of struggle took place inside the house,” he said at the Monday press conference.
He appealed to the public for help in finding the couple, but by later that day, he called a second press conference to provide a tragic update.
“This has been an incident of homicide and now it is a recovery effort,” he said.
The couple’s son, 21-year-old Jose Guadalupe Ramirez, and another man, 20-year-old Matthew Roberts, were arrested on Monday in connection to their deaths. Ramirez was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, while Roberts was charged with obstruction of justice and concealment of a homicidal death, Asbell said.
Police said Ramirez told them he killed his parents early Friday and dumped their bodies off of a bridge into a body of water.
Ramirez was allegedly unable to provide an exact location where he dropped his parents’ bodies into the water, officials said. The location was chosen at random, police said.
Investigators narrowed in on Ramirez early on in the investigation as tipsters suggested his possible involvement in the case, The Peoria Journal Star reported.
The victims’ son has no known criminal record, and a motive for the killings was not clear, but Ramirez allegedly was known to harbor a “hatred” for his parents, the newspaper wrote.
Police at Bradley University, where the slain couple worked, filed a report in 2011 on Ramirez for allegedly writing on a bathroom mirror in an academic building that he wanted to “kill [his] parents,” according to the Journal Star. Brill de Ramirez was an English professor at the university, while her husband, Ramirez Barron, worked at as a technology support specialist in the IT department.
Further details about Roberts’ alleged involvement were not provided.
Asbell said he did not expect any further arrests in the case to be made and noted the community should not be concerned for their own well-beings, as he believed this was an isolated incident.
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