Hispanic/Latino male, age 46, Jose Guadalupe González Trejo finished an ordinary week in Anchorage and simply didn't show up for work on July 16, 2016. Coworkers called police because he never missed a shift, and his family was worried—silence from him was not normal. Officers opened a missing-person investigation that day, but leads were scarce and the case cooled with time.
For years, his disappearance was a question that lingered at the edges of the city, a date on the calendar with no answer.
In the summer of 2021, far south of the city in the high country of Turnagain Pass along the Seward Highway, Alaska State Troopers found human remains. Early the next year, forensic work—including DNA analysis by the FBI Laboratory—confirmed what Anchorage detectives had long feared: the remains were those of Jose Guadalupe González Trejo, and this was not a man who had simply walked away. His death was reclassified as a homicide, and detectives renewed their appeal for anyone who had not yet spoken with them to come forward.
The cold case began to thaw. On October 17, 2022, an Anchorage grand jury indicted 39-year-old Jose Evangelista on two counts of second-degree murder, charging that he shot Jose Guadalupe González Trejo on July 16, 2016—the very day he was reported missing. Authorities noted that once the remains were identified, the case moved to the department's Cold Case Unit, and the new evidence paved the way to the charges. Evangelista was taken into custody by the Department of Corrections and scheduled for arraignment in Superior Court two days later. Investigators credited the medical examiner, state crime lab, Alaska State Troopers, the FBI lab, and members of the public with helping close the gap between a vanishing and a name.
Even after the indictment, the plea to the community remained: if anyone still held a fragment of memory or detail from that summer, detectives wanted to hear it. In official notices, police listed case numbers 16-29833 and 22-14704 and maintained the homicide investigation, a reminder that while an arrest had been made, the full story of what happened to Jose Guadalupe González Trejo—age 46, gone on a Saturday—was assembled piece by piece, and that final answers depend on every piece finding its place.
