Left: Alexander Reyes after his 2024 arrest. Right: Reyes after his 2023 arrest (Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office)
An Arizona man accused of killing a 17-year-old boy last year only to have the murder charge dropped because of a lack of evidence is again back behind bars, this time accused of stabbing another man to death.
Alexander Martin Reyes, 25, is facing a second-degree murder charge in the death of Gabriel Trejo, according to Phoenix police. Cops responded around 9 a.m. July 31 to the area of 17th Avenue and Spruce Street after firefighters found Trejo, 36, under a blanket suffering from multiple stab wounds. Paramedics pronounced him dead. After reviewing surveillance footage, cops arrested Reyes nearby. Reyes has a distinctive face tattoo with the letters NLB running down his right cheek. Police say he declined to speak with investigators.
Officers took him to the Maricopa County Jail where he remains on a $1 million bond.
It’s the second murder charge Reyes is facing in just over 14 months.
In the other case, he’s accused of shooting 17-year-old Matthew Ballesteros to death during a barbecue. Just before midnight on May 13, 2023, Phoenix officers responded to a shooting call at an apartment complex near 39th Avenue and McDowell Road, where Ballesteros and Reyes were allegedly having a barbecue in the common area of an apartment complex.
A probable cause arrest affidavit obtained by local Fox affiliate KSAZ said Ballesteros had gone to a nearby apartment around 8 p.m. during the barbecue to ask for a phone so he could call his mother to pick him up.
“The victim made statements to the occupant of that apartment that defendant was not acting right,” the affidavit reportedly said.
He returned to the apartment around 11:30 p.m. to ask for the phone again and told the person inside that Reyes had pointed a gun at him. Minutes after Ballesteros left the apartment, witnesses heard shots fired and saw him on the ground suffering from gunshot wounds.
Police found Ballesteros suffering from gunshot wounds. First responders rushed him to the hospital where doctors pronounced him dead the next day — Mother’s Day. On May 17, 2023, cops arrested Reyes for murder.
But the murder charges against Reyes didn’t stick. Ballesteros’ mother told KSAZ that the Maricopa County State Attorney’s Office sent her a letter saying they could not pursue the case because of a lack of evidence.
She was at work when she heard that Reyes had been accused of killing again.
“I had to leave. I couldn’t breathe,” she told the TV station. “To know that he has harmed, killed somebody else when this shouldn’t have happened. This shouldn’t have happened. It just opens a wound of the day that I had to say my goodbyes to my son.”
She plans to keep tabs on the newest murder case to make sure both her and Trejo’s family get justice.
“I want them to know my face, to know that I am Matthew’s mother and Matthew was taken from me,” she said in an interview with the TV station. “You took a life of a man that was sleeping on the ground and a 17-year-old boy from the back. That’s the biggest coward. They let this man go to do the same thing to somebody else. Now not only am I hurting from this, another family’s hurting.”
The Maricopa County State Attorney’s Office did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
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