Roger Brumback, 65, a White male, was a renowned Creighton University pathologist preparing for retirement when he and his wife, Mary, were found dead inside their west Omaha home on May 14, 2013. A piano mover arriving for an appointment noticed the front door ajar and discovered the grim scene, prompting police to open a double-homicide investigation that immediately drew connections to an earlier unsolved case involving Creighton colleagues.
In those first days, investigators did not publicly detail how the couple was killed.
As detectives sifted through leads, they noted parallels to the 2008 slayings of 11-year-old Thomas Hunter and the Hunter family s housekeeper, Shirlee Sherman murders tied to the same Creighton pathology circle where Brumback had long served. The professional connection between Brumback and Dr. William Hunter, Thomas s father, put investigators on a path that would soon focus on a former pathology resident whose career at Creighton had ended badly years earlier. A joint task force of Omaha police, the FBI, and out-of-state agencies began building a picture of a suspect who, they believed, had returned to Omaha to settle scores.
On July 15, 2013, Illinois State Police stopped and arrested Dr. Anthony Garcia near the Indiana border. Authorities alleged that Garcia had been fired from Creighton s pathology residency by Brumback and Hunter, and that the homicides were part of a revenge scheme. Investigators said Roger was shot and stabbed and Mary was fatally stabbed, and they recovered a. 45-caliber handgun in Garcia s vehicle at the time of his arrest. Garcia was booked on four counts of first-degree murder and related weapons charges tied to the Brumback and Hunter/Sherman killings.
Prosecutors later laid out evidence that placed Garcia in Omaha around the time of the Brumback murders, including credit card activity, cell-phone searches for the Brumback address, and items seized from his home that suggested planning and attempts to mask his identity. A Nebraska jury convicted him in October 2016 of the four murders, concluding that the Brumback attack was the continuation of a years-long vendetta that began after his dismissal from Creighton.
Years after the convictions, appellate courts upheld the outcome. In September 2023, the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed Garcia s convictions and death sentence, rejecting his challenges and solidifying the case s resolution in the judicial record. For Roger Brumback s family, friends, and colleagues, the ruling closed a loop that began with a quiet house on a spring afternoon and a door left slightly open, leading investigators from a fresh crime scene back to an old wound and, ultimately, to a single suspect held responsible.
