Guillermo Sotelo, a 55-year-old Hispanic/Latino male, worked as a taxi driver for Crazy 8’s Taxi Company, commuting daily from his home in San Luis, Mexico to serve the Yuma and Somerton, Arizona area, where his killing is recorded as a Somerton homicide that resulted in his death being listed as occurring on August 1, 2018. In the early hours of July 30, he was dispatched to pick up a customer in Somerton; the call came in around 2:30 a.m., but his employer later said he never checked in to
confirm the pickup or his destination. When he failed to return and could not be reached, his wife filed a missing-person report, and the taxi company appealed to the community for information, noting that while drivers had occasionally been robbed or stiffed on fares in the past, nothing this serious had ever happened.
By the evening of July 31, officers from the Somerton Police Department were sent to a stretch of Highway 95 near milepost 16 after a report of a body in the desert off the roadway. They found an unresponsive man lying a short distance from the highway with at least one gunshot wound and pronounced him dead at the scene; he was soon identified as Guillermo Sotelo, the missing cab driver. Days later, regional reporting described that he had been shot in the head and back before his body was left beside the highway in a remote desert area outside Somerton, underscoring the brutality of the attack.
Investigators quickly connected the homicide scene to Sotelo’s last fare. At the time of the initial public appeal, police noted that he had been driving a turquoise 2001 Honda Odyssey minivan bearing Arizona plates and a “4 ACES” logo on the doors, matching the branding referenced when the customer originally called for a cab. Early bulletins stated that the vehicle had not yet been found, but subsequent accounts explain that it was later located in Yuma, abandoned in an alley near 28th Street and Avenue A with a flat tire. Detectives from Somerton, working in coordination with Cocopah tribal police, used leads related to the taxi and its movements to narrow in on those believed to have lured Sotelo out to the desert under the pretense of a routine fare.
Within roughly two weeks of the killing, Somerton police announced arrests in the case: two teenagers were taken into custody on suspicion of having carried out the murder during an apparent robbery scheme, and they were booked on one count each of first-degree murder. Shortly afterward, prosecutors moved to have both suspects tried as adults, identifying them as Tyrus Nathan Twist and Haley Dawn Hoover and setting substantial cash-only bonds while the case proceeded through Yuma County courts. Some time later, reporting in 2020 revealed that Twist reached a plea agreement, admitting guilt to second-degree murder and armed robbery in connection with Sotelo’s death, with the original first-degree murder and related charges dismissed in exchange for the plea and sentencing exposure ranging into multiple decades of imprisonment. The same coverage identified a third participant, Jada Herrera, who had placed the call for the cab as part of a planned armed robbery; she was subsequently convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to several years in prison, while Hoover remained jailed awaiting trial. Homicide records and case summaries now classify the case as solved, with law-enforcement and court documents attributing Sotelo’s killing to this group of young accomplices who turned a routine late-night taxi fare into a deadly ambush on a lonely highway outside Somerton.
