By The newspaper
24 Feb 2024, 09:27 AM EST
Reign Tapiato has been charged as a suspect in the death of Jakarah López Moore, a 16-year-old teenager whose body was found in a forest in New York with a gunshot wound to the head.
Deputies arrested Tapiato, 27, yesterday morning in Rochester, six months after Lopez Moore’s death. According to the police, the young man took the minor to a forest on August 27 and fatally shot her in the head, he highlighted. NBC News.
No one, regardless of age, should suffer the tragic fate of being murdered in cold blood.
That day Jakarah left her home on Weld Street and her family reported her missing to the police when she did not return. According to her grandmother, her last words at his house were “I’ll be right back.”
A month and a half later, on October 14, people fishing in the Erie Canal discovered the body in the woods behind Vanguard Parkway. Rochester Police (RPD) investigators determined that López Moore had been killed the same night she disappeared and identified Tapiato as her suspect.
According to RPD, Tapiato had a loaded gun at the time of his arrest yesterday. In addition to murder, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon. Tapiato was taken to the Monroe County Jail pending arraignment today in Rochester City Court.
The motive for the crime is unclear, but police said Tapiato and Lopez Moore knew each other and the homicide was not a random act of violence.
“I ask that we continue to pray for the family and continue to care for our young people as they go through all the trials and tribulations that they go through in their lives,” Mayor Malik Evans said at the police press conference yesterday. “But no one, regardless of their age, should suffer the tragic fate of being murdered in cold blood like Jakarah was.”
All charges are mere accusations and those charged are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court.
While police were searching for Lopez Moore, a 9-year-old girl disappeared from a state park in upstate New York on September 29. She was found alive and this week Craig Nelson Ross Jr. pleaded guilty to kidnapping and sexually assaulting her before her trial began in Saratoga County.
In another similar case, the girl of Mexican origin Dulce María Alavez has been missing for more than four years, last seen in a park in New Jersey when she was 5 years old, in September 2019. A reward offered of $75,000 dollars and the The work of the FBI – one of the most advanced investigative forces in the world – has not been enough to find her or at least know what happened to her.