Nineteen-year-old Aaron Villarreal, a Hispanic man from Junction City, Kansas, was killed in a double homicide in the early morning hours of May 7, 2020. Shortly before 2 a.m., officers with the Junction City Police Department responded to reports of shots fired in the 800 block of West 11th Street. At a home located at 805 W. 11th St., they discovered Aaron and another man, 21-year-old Dillon Spencer, both deceased from apparent gunshot wounds.
The investigation quickly led authorities
to identify two suspects. The first, Dontavion Wright, an 18-year-old from Talladega, Alabama, was taken into custody in Talladega County on June 3, 2020. He was arrested on a Geary County warrant for two counts of first-degree murder and held on a $2 million bond while awaiting extradition back to Kansas.
A second suspect, Nathaniel Roderick Holmes, remained at large for several more months. Law enforcement officials located and arrested Holmes, who was also known as “Nook,” on September 9, 2020, in Radcliff, Kentucky. He was also wanted on a warrant for two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of Villarreal and Spencer. Holmes was held for extradition to face the charges against him.
The two men were tried separately in Geary County. In August 2023, following a four-day jury trial, Nathaniel Holmes was found not guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and was acquitted of all charges. Dontavion Wright later faced his own jury trial and was found guilty of the first-degree premeditated murder of Aaron Villarreal and the second-degree intentional murder of Dillon Spencer.
For his convictions, Wright was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 50 years. He appealed the verdict, but the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed his convictions, stating that sufficient evidence had been presented to support the first-degree premeditated murder conviction. As of the court's decision in January 2026, the case is considered closed.
