In early October 2023, the family of 26-year-old Brandon Rivas-Noriega grew concerned when they received distressing messages from him stating he was in trouble and needed money. He had last been seen on October 3, driving his mother's 2015 Ford Focus. Two days later, on October 5, his family officially reported him as a missing person to the authorities in South Nashville.
The investigation into his disappearance soon led detectives to a residence on Fanning Drive, a place Rivas-Noriega was known to frequent.
A search of the Fanning Drive home uncovered crucial evidence, including the owner's manual for a Ford Focus and Rivas-Noriega's driver's license. This discovery also led police to a property on Rural Hill Road. There, behind an abandoned trailer, they located the Ford Focus his family had reported him missing in. Inside the trunk of the car, investigators made a grim discovery: the decomposing remains of a human body. An autopsy later confirmed the remains belonged to Brandon Rivas-Noriega and determined his cause of death to be multiple gunshot wounds. In a disturbing detail, it was found that several of his tattoos had been cut from his body.
The investigation into the death of Brandon Rivas-Noriega led police to 31-year-old Kevin Joel Castro-Garcia, who was alleged to have shot Rivas-Noriega inside the Fanning Drive residence. Castro-Garcia was subsequently charged with criminal homicide and abuse of a corpse in connection with Rivas-Noriega's death. At the time of this charge, Castro-Garcia was already facing a criminal homicide charge for a separate incident that occurred in September of the same year. In that case, the badly burned body of another man was found in the trunk of a car that had been set on fire. Castro-Garcia, a native of Honduras who had been deported from the United States twice, was jailed on a bond of over one million dollars.
