A Baltimore man has been busted in connection with the murder of a transgender woman last month, ending a five-week probe during which cops tracked him down from grainy surveillance footage of his car’s distinctive paint job, police said.
Gerardo Thomas, 33, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Zoe Spears, 23, who was discovered shot to death on June 13 in Fairmount Heights.
Thomas was busted last Wednesday in Cecil County after investigators narrowed down 50,000 vehicle records to one 2018 Dodge Caravan GT with a unique “billet silver” color that was rented to Thomas in Baltimore, Prince George’s County Police Department announced Thursday.
Investigators spent five weeks tracking down Thomas after a Dodge Caravan was spotted in a “grainy” single black-and-white surveillance image taken near where Spears was killed, Homicide Cmdr. Maj. Brian Reilly told reporters.
After contacting motor vehicle authorities in Washington, Maryland and Virginia for all records related to Dodge Caravans, more than 50,000 records were returned. Investigators then reached out to nearby Dodge dealerships and determined the vehicle had an atypical shade on about only 3,000 such vehicles in the region, Kelly said.
Thomas was later identified as a suspect after detectives scoured license-plate reader data and found that just one of those vehicles had been had caught on camera approximately two hours prior to the murder and less than a mile away, Reilly said.
Thomas, who remains held without bail Monday, has admitted being armed and inside the Dodge Caravan at the time of Spears’ murder, Reilly said.
Police have not yet determined a motive in the shooting and there’s no evidence suggesting that Spears’ death was connected to the unsolved fatal shooting of another transgender woman, Ashanti Carmon, who gunned down in March just blocks from where Spears was killed.
“He was very vague about his involvement,” Reilly said. “However, he does place himself on the scene. He does place himself there with a shotgun, and he does place himself inside of that vehicle.”
