Do you know who murdered Sarah Keyenejad?
In the early hours of Valentine's Day in 1996, a tragic event unfolded at a 7-Eleven on Bonanza and Pecos roads in Las Vegas. Inside, 19-year-old Sarah Keyenejad, a white female, was waiting for her husband, Justin Snyder, to finish his shift. She was six months pregnant with a baby boy they planned to name Tyler Matthew. The couple had recently moved to Las Vegas from Southern California and were excitedly preparing for the arrival of their first child.
The ordinary night took a horrifying turn when two men, disguised in women's clothing and armed with a long gun and a handgun, entered the convenience store to commit a robbery. As one of the men entered, he turned without warning and fired a single shot, striking Sarah in the chest. The bullet traveled into her abdomen and also struck the unborn fetus. The robbers fled the scene with a mere $50. Sarah was rushed to University Medical Center, but she succumbed to her injuries. She and her unborn son were later buried in the same casket in Big Bear City, California.
For more than two decades, the case remained cold, a painful and unresolved tragedy for Sarah's family. Investigators had few leads, and a $25,000 reward offered in the weeks following the murder yielded no convictions. However, in July 2020, a breakthrough finally came. Two men, Anthony Williams and Kareem Brock, were formally charged with murder, manslaughter for the death of the unborn child, robbery, burglary, and conspiracy to commit robbery. According to a witness, the motive for the shooting was that Brock believed Sarah had tried to look at his face.
The legal proceedings that followed brought mixed results for Sarah's grieving family. All charges against Anthony Williams were eventually dismissed. Kareem Brock's case was bound over to District Court, but all charges except for one count of open murder were dismissed after a dispute over witness testimony. The long-awaited arrests brought a measure of hope, but the subsequent legal outcomes left the family with a continued sense of injustice for the loss of Sarah and her unborn son.
