On April 20, 2013, 22-year-old Karen Natalia Cid-DeLeon, a Hispanic woman from the Oklahoma City area, was found dead near Lake Overholser, ending a two-week period in which her family had been searching for her and pleading for answers. She had been reported missing by her mother on April 6, after failing to return home, and what began as a missing-persons case slowly turned into a homicide investigation that would span months and cross state lines.
That April day, a group of volunteers fanned out along the 6900 block of North Morgan Road, just west of the city, to pick up trash along the edge of Lake Overholser. While working near the shoreline, they came across a body and called police. Investigators soon identified the victim as Karen, who was from Oklahoma City and had recently graduated from high school in nearby Midwest City. Local coverage described how authorities were left asking not only who she was but why her life had ended there, in a secluded stretch by the lake.
In the days that followed, detectives worked with the medical examiner to determine how she died. Early reports noted that her exact cause of death was not immediately clear, but the circumstances at the scene led police to treat the case as a homicide. By late April, Oklahoma City police publicly classified her death as one of the city’s homicides for 2013 and emphasized that, at that point, they had no suspects. They appealed for help from the public, asking anyone who might have seen something unusual around Lake Overholser or who knew about Karen’s movements after she disappeared to contact the homicide tip line. For a time, the case seemed to stall in that uncertain space, formally labeled a killing yet without a clear narrative of how it had happened or who had been responsible.
Months later, in July 2013, the investigation took a sharp turn. Prosecutors announced that a 29-year-old man named Juan Carlos Garcia had been arrested in Webb County, Texas, in connection with Karen’s death. Oklahoma news coverage reported that Garcia was accused in her death and described him as a murder suspect arrested out of state after the Oklahoma case had been classified as a homicide. Officials in Oklahoma prepared the paperwork to bring him back, while reports from the time noted that he was fighting extradition from Texas. Those brief updates sketched the outline of a suspect and a possible path toward a courtroom, but publicly available reports do not clearly detail what ultimately happened with the charges or how the legal proceedings concluded, leaving the public record focused more on the fact of his arrest than on any final resolution.
Today, case summaries maintained by victim-advocacy and cold-case sites still recount how volunteers found Karen’s body near Lake Overholser, how her disappearance had been reported days earlier, and how investigators ultimately treated her death as a homicide. They also note the later arrest of Garcia in Texas, underscoring that this was not a case forgotten immediately after the discovery by the lake, but one that drew law enforcement attention across state lines and continues to live on in public databases and online forums dedicated to unsolved or unresolved violent deaths in Oklahoma City.
