Mary Brumback, a 65-year-old white woman, was found dead alongside her husband, Dr. Roger Brumback, in their west Omaha home on May 14, 2013. A piano mover arriving for an appointment noticed the front door ajar and alerted authorities, who discovered the couple inside the house on Shirley Street. Investigators later described a brutal scene: Roger was shot multiple times and stabbed, and Mary was found nearby in the living room with numerous stab wounds to the neck.
The discovery stunned Omaha and the Creighton University community, where Roger had served as chair of the Department of Pathology.
Detectives quickly began searching for connections between the attack and an unsolved 2008 double homicide: the stabbing deaths of 11-year-old Thomas Hunter and the Hunters housekeeper, Shirlee Sherman, in another Omaha home. The Brumback crime scene and the earlier killings would eventually be linked by a task force, drawing investigators toward a single suspect with a fraught history at Creighton s pathology residency program.
Two months after the Brumbacks were killed, police arrested former medical resident Anthony J. Garcia during a traffic stop in southern Illinois. Officers recovered a. 45-caliber handgun; subsequent testing tied the weapon to the shooting of Roger Brumback. Garcia had been terminated from Creighton s pathology program years earlier by faculty that included Dr. Brumback and Dr. William Hunter, and prosecutors alleged he embarked on a revenge campaign that spanned five years and two families.
Garcia was charged with four counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Thomas Hunter and Shirlee Sherman in 2008 and of Roger and Mary Brumback in 2013. After a high-profile trial, a Douglas County jury convicted him on October 26, 2016. In September 2018, a three-judge panel sentenced Garcia to death, a punishment later upheld on appeal. With the verdict and sentence, authorities formally closed the question of who killed Mary Brumback and why, attributing the crime to a calculated act of retaliation.
