The dead bodies that Texas investigators believe to have been a pregnant woman and her boyfriend were found with gunshot wounds days after they were reported missing, police said Wednesday.
A medical examiner has yet to confirm that it was the bodies of Savanah Nicole Soto, 18, and Matthew Guerra, 22, that police found in a car parked outside a San Antonio apartment complex Tuesday. But the fact that they were shot offers the first indication of what may have happened at a crime scene that the city’s police chief described as “very, very perplexing.”
Authorities have so far offered limited details on the case, which is being investigated as a capital-potential murder. A Wednesday statement from the San Antonio police department listed the victims as an 18-year-old woman, a 22-year-old man and an unborn child.
Soto was a week overdue to deliver her baby and was scheduled to have an induced labor at a hospital last Saturday night, her family told KENS-TV. But her mother said she got no answer Saturday afternoon, when she knocked on the door of Soto’s apartment in the suburb of Leon Valley.
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The family spent Christmas night searching the area. On Monday, Leon Valley police issued a missing-person alert for Soto and later said Guerra also could not be found.
“Savanah was so, so happy because she was going to be a mommy. It breaks my heart,” her mother told KENS-TV.
San Antonio Police Chief William P. McManus said that the bodies found Tuesday were in a Kia Optima matching the description of one that belongs to Guerra. He said investigators believe them to be the missing couple but could not say for sure without confirmation from the medical examiner.
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“What we’re looking at right now is a very, very perplexing crime scene,” McManus said Tuesday night, without elaborating. He said he didn’t know whether a weapon had been found in the car, and police did not directly respond to that and other emailed questions Wednesday.
Guerra and Soto were not among the dead listed in the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office’s online death records database on Wednesday afternoon.
Guerra was arrested on Christmas of 2022 for assaulting Soto and sentenced to probation, according to court records obtained by WOAI-TV. A judge extended the sentence through February 2025 after Guerra later was arrested on other charges. The conditions of his probation barred him from possessing a weapon and from having “harmful or injurious” communication with Soto.
