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A tip sent to an online fundraising campaign recently allowed investigators to jail the prime suspect in a deadly 2017 stabbing in Arizona – a case which otherwise appeared as if it might not yield any arrests, according to authorities.
The remarkable chain of events, which began with a tip to a page on the GoFundMe platform in September, led to the 15 October arrest in Mexico of Michael Anthony Arredondo, who is accused of stabbing Evin Paulos about 30 times and killing him while the two were traveling together.
Arredondo was subsequently transferred to the custody of the Phoenix police department, and he was ordered held in lieu of $1.5m bail, officials said at a news briefing on Monday.
At that news briefing, Paulos’s sister, Eviein, said she was unsure precisely how the tipster – a Mexican person – found out about her brother’s slaying or what motivated him to reach out to her family, as the Arizona Republic Online recounted.
“Was it a little angel that sent him through, to give us a little bit of relief?” she remarked.
Arredondo, 34, befriended Paulos after moving in across the street from him, as the sister reportedly put it. But the two men were not getting along toward the end of Paulos’s life, and they had evidently been drawn into a fistfight with each other outside a nearby hospital, a relative told investigators, according to court records cited by the Arizona Republic Online.
Paulos was purportedly under the impression that the fight with Arredondo had settled their differences. And Paulos on 3 June 2017 was seen leaving in a car with Arredondo, even though his mother was worried that the latter man was acting erratically, the Arizona Republic Online reported.
Later that morning, the court records cited by the outlet said, the 25-year-old Paulos’s body was found riddled with stab wounds in a patch of desert about 10 miles away from his neighborhood. Authorities later recovered Arredondo’s vehicle in the Los Angeles area, parked outside the home of a woman with whom he had previously had a romantic relationship.
There was no sign of Arredondo, though there was allegedly blood in the car and a kitchen knife on the floor of the back seat, according to the court records reviewed by Arizona Republic Online.
In the days after his killing, Paulos’s family launched a GoFundMe page requesting financial assistance. The page asserted it was ironic that, before dying violently, Paulos had come to the US at age four with his family from war-torn Iraq as they sought refuge.
“The family had come to seek a peaceful and safe life,” the page said. “Unfortunately, that is not what the family found.”
Finally, in September, that page received a message in Spanish saying the suspect in Paulos’s killing was in Mexico.
Eviein Paulos told reporters on Monday that she replied to the message saying: “Please, I don’t know if this is a scam or not. Can you send me some kind of evidence, send me a picture?’”
The person responded with a picture of Arredondo. Relatively soon after that, Mexican officials collaborated with Phoenix police, local prosecutors and the US Marshal Service to capture Arredondo and return him to the US to face a second-degree murder charge contained in a grand jury indictment that had already been handed up against him.
On Monday during the news briefing, Phoenix police detective Dominick Rostenberg said Arredondo – after his arrest – had confessed to killing Paulos. But, according to Rostenberg, he stopped short of explaining what if anything provoked him to kill Arredondo or why he stabbed him so many times.
Rostenberg said Arredondo’s arrest sent the unmistakable message that “even with the passage of time, we’re still looking for you, we’re still hunting you down – justice is going to take its course”.
Eviein Paulos said her brother’s slaying left her “disappointed in how humanity is” – but she was confident he had a “one-way ticket to heaven”.
“At least we’re a little bit at peace,” she said of Arredondo’s arrest, according to the Phoenix news station KSAZ. “I can let go of the anger that I’ve had for so long and just try to concentrate on life.”
