White/Caucasian male, age 19, Justin Davis Trnka died on March 17, 2009, in Newark, Delaware. That Tuesday evening, he was discovered inside his car behind the BJ’s store at 100 Pencader Plaza, slumped in the driver’s seat with a gunshot wound. First responders rushed him to Christiana Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, and detectives began working a scene tucked behind a busy shopping plaza, piecing together how a teenager’s ordinary night ended in violence.
In the days that followed, the case moved into the realm of tips and quiet interviews, ultimately joining the rolls of Delaware State Police cold cases. Flyers and brief notices preserved the essential facts: a 19-year-old found shot in his vehicle behind the store, the time and place fixed in memory but the shooter unnamed. Family memorials and obituary records kept his name present—Justin Davis Trnka, 19, remembered by loved ones while investigators pressed on without a public suspect.
More than fourteen years later, a break arrived. Following a cold-case investigation, on April 24, 2023, a New Castle County grand jury indicted 31-year-old Ricardo J. Vega—who would have been 17 at the time—on two counts of Murder in the First Degree for the killing of Justin Trnka. Authorities said Trnka was killed during an armed robbery on March 17, 2009; potential robbery counts were not pursued because the statute of limitations for that offense had elapsed. Delaware State Police took Vega into custody on April 26, 2023.
The public notices and press releases do not detail subsequent trial proceedings or a final adjudication, but they mark a decisive turn: a named defendant, an arrest, and the allegation that the fatal shot behind the Newark BJ’s was tied to a robbery. For years the case had been a stark one-page summary in the cold-case files; by 2023 it had a suspect and a path forward through the courts, renewing hopes for resolution for those who had kept the 19-year-old’s name alive since that night in Pencader Plaza.
