Suspect sketch released in store owner's murder

His name was Tomas Gonzales. No, you didn't know him. In fact, you probably didn't know he existed until his murder was featured on FOX 26 Morning News on May 5. But he was someone very important to his widow and his two children.

“In reality, he destroyed my kids’ lives. He left a four-year-old and a nine-year-old without a father," said Marta Ventura in Spanish.

It was 12 a.m. on May 5 that Gonzales had just returned home with food for the family when two or three men fired gunshots at him and ran away. They have still not been caught. His relatives say he owned a clothing store and his life revolved around the store and them.

Gonzales' store is on the second floor of a building that houses a church, a convenience store and another clothing store. He lived not far away, just one street up and a few doors down. Usually when a business owner is killed, robbery is the motive, but in this case police do not believe so. That being said, they don't know what the motive was either

“The family inside the house and the witness we spoke to, nobody has brought  forward that there was an argument or some kind of dispute or disturbance that led to the shooting,” said Sgt. Anthony Turner.

Investigators say they are not getting a lot of information from the public and they are hoping a new composite sketch will help jog some memories and get people to come forward. People in the neighborhood tell FOX 26 that the sketch looks similar to a man who may have had a physical confrontation with Gonzales the night before his murder. They say the man said he knew who Gonzales was, a store owner. A clue? Just a rumor?  We will see, but for now, police are calling this a senseless killing, a death that was barely covered in the news but that tore apart a family..

“From the night to the morning, everything changed,“ said Ventura.

And she said it could happened to anyone.