New details have been released in the case of a Florida woman found dead after she and her boyfriend were reported missing last month.
The gruesome information comes from court documents obtained by WESH in Daytona Beach from Orange County, where Carmen Elsa Escalante Carrera, 29, and Jorge Javier Quintero, 41, were reported missing by family members on October 29.
US Marshals eventually found Quintero in a suburb of Mobile, Alabama, where he was wounded in a shootout with law enforcement, as CrimeOnline reported. Escalante Carrera was not with him, but her body was later found in Georgia.
The new documents say that her body was found on the side of a highway in Georgia, with the last pings from her phone coming from Seminole County, an odd-shaped county that barely touches Florida in southwestern Georgia.
As previously reported, Orange County deputies began the hunt for the pair after relatives said he’d made suicidal statements in text messages. The new documents say that deputies conducted a welfare check just after 8 a.m. on October 29 and found a large kitchen knife, a bloody bathtub, bloody clothes, Quintero’s phone, and handwritten suicide notes.
The deputies also obtained security video that showed a man walking out of the apartment’s back door and driving away in a white truck — later determined to have been rented by Quintero — 30 minutes before they arrived.
They also found information related to another apartment, rented to Quintero. The couple was in the process of moving to the new address, the documents say, and deputies found more bloody items there, along with personal items belonging to Escalante Carrera.
By 1:30 p.m. that day, license plate readers had been pinging the rental truck as it traveled away from Orange County and Escalante Carrerra’s phone pinged in the Georgia county.
The license plate readers in Florida showed a large trash bag in the truck’s bed.
Meanwhile, financial records showed Escalante Carrera’s bank card used at a gas station in Lake City, Florida, at about 11 a.m., and security footage from the store showed Quintero making those purchases using her phone.
Two days later, marshals found Quintero in Saraland, Alabama, and took him into custody after a shootout that left him critically wounded.
Three hours after the shootout, Georgia officials found Escalante Carrera’s body in a suitcase beside a highway. According to the police report, she had a power cord wrapped around her neck and had been stripped naked. Her body was partially dismembered.
An autopsy determined that she died from ligature strangulation.
Quintero was released from the hospital in Alabama on November 7, according to WALA. He was extradited to Florida and booked into the Orange County jail on Monday, charged with first degree murder and fraudulent use of personal identification, jail records show.
