Deborah Ann Carrillo, a 67-year-old White / Caucasian female from Rio Rico, Arizona, was known to family and friends as “Debbie,” and is remembered in her obituary as a hardworking, warm-hearted person who shared both her personal life and work life closely with her husband, Benjamin Carrillo. Born in Ohio on September 21, 1957, she eventually settled in Rio Rico, where loved ones describe her as cheerful and kind, someone who enjoyed simple pastimes like driving around, going out to eat,
playing pool, and working on home-repair projects with Benjamin. These shared projects are portrayed as a source of pride for her, helping turn their house into a welcoming space for relatives and friends, and her memorial notes that she maintained close bonds with her siblings and extended family.
On April 6, 2024, Santa Cruz County authorities were called to a residence on Paseo Enebro in Rio Rico, where deputies found Deborah dead inside the home with two gunshot wounds to the head. A case summary on CrimeSolversCentral, which compiles information from law-enforcement and news reports, states that the nature of the injuries and the circumstances at the scene initially led investigators to suspect foul play, and the death was treated as a possible homicide while a formal criminal investigation began. That summary lists her as a Rio Rico resident, confirms the April 6 date of death, and classifies the incident under “death by force.”
According to a Nogales International article relayed through a LocalNews/NovaNews aggregation page, Sheriff David Hathaway reported that a 68-year-old man, identified as Benjamin J. Carrillo, was arrested after deputies responded to what was then described as an apparent homicide in Rio Rico. The report says he was booked into the Santa Cruz County jail and that he was charged with second-degree murder in connection with his wife’s death, indicating that at that early stage of the investigation he was being held by authorities on a serious homicide charge pending further review of the evidence.
Later developments are reflected indirectly through secondary sites that track gun-related deaths. The National Gun Violence Memorial entry for Deborah lists, among its linked news sources, two Nogales International stories: one about the arrest and a subsequent one titled “Rio Rico woman’s death determined to be suicide.” CrimeSolversCentral similarly lists that later article in its “links to additional sources” for her case. Taken together, these references show that, after additional forensic or investigative work, local reporting stated that authorities had concluded the fatal gunshot wounds were self-inflicted and that the case was no longer being treated as a homicide. However, the publicly accessible summaries do not spell out in detail what happened procedurally to the second-degree-murder charge or how the criminal case against Benjamin Carrillo was formally resolved.
Overall, the online record depicts a sequence in which Deborah’s death was first investigated as a possible domestic homicide, with her spouse arrested and jailed on a murder charge, before later being reported by local news as a suicide. Case-tracking and advocacy sites still tend to catalog her death under headings such as “death by force” or within compilations of fatal shootings, reflecting the involvement of a firearm even as the legal classification appears to have changed over time. Obituaries and memorials, by contrast, focus on her personality and relationships, portraying her as a beloved member of the Rio Rico community whose death—whatever its final legal designation—left a deep impact on family and friends.
