Nearly thirteen years after a Maryvale security guard was shot dead on an overnight shift, Phoenix police have made an arrest. Officers arrested Joe Gerardo, 43, in Globe, Arizona, on November 3, 2026, and he was booked into the Maricopa County jail on one count of first-degree murder in the 2013 killing of Jeffrey Bellemare, according to a Phoenix Police Department announcement reported on Monday, November 9.
Source: AZFamily (KPHO/KTVK)
Bellemare, 59, was working as an unarmed security guard at the Graybriar Apartments, at 3810 N. Maryvale Parkway near Clarendon Avenue in west Phoenix, when he was shot at around 1:30 a.m. on November 29, 2013. He had left a Thanksgiving dinner to go to work that overnight shift, AZFamily reported, and he died of his wounds. No arrest was made at the time, and the case went cold.
Police say the break came this year. Phoenix homicide detectives had pursued leads in the case for years before receiving new information in 2026; cold case detectives followed up on it and identified Gerardo as the suspect, the department said. The announcement did not describe what the new information was, did not identify a motive, and did not say whether detectives link Gerardo to either of the people described in the witness appeal issued after the 2013 shooting.
What police have — and have not — said
The department's announcement is short on evidence, deliberately so: it does not set out what ties Gerardo to the Graybriar Apartments that night, and reporting on the announcement noted that no public court filing detailing the evidence behind the arrest, or confirming a first hearing date, could be verified on Monday. That means the central questions in the case — what the new information was, whether it came from a witness, a tip or forensic work, and what police say happened in the apartment complex that night — remain unanswered in public for now.
Gerardo is charged by allegation only. An arrest and a booking on one count of first-degree murder are not a conviction, and he is presumed innocent unless and until the state proves the charge in court. A first-degree murder charge in Arizona is the most serious homicide charge in the state, and a case of this age will turn on how much of the 2013 evidence — witness accounts, scene records and any physical evidence kept in storage — can still be presented and tested in court.
A family that waited almost thirteen years
For Bellemare's family, the arrest ends a wait that began the night after Thanksgiving in 2013. AZFamily reported that his family spent years hoping someone would come forward with information about who shot a 59-year-old guard who had gone to work an overnight shift at a residential complex in Maryvale, the large west-Phoenix neighbourhood where the Graybriar Apartments stand. Police have not announced any contact with the family beyond the arrest announcement, and the family has not made a public statement in the reporting so far.
Phoenix police maintain a Cold Case Homicide Unit that re-reviews unsolved killings years and even decades later. The same unit announced in February 2025 an arrest in a 1986 Maryvale-area killing after detectives re-examined evidence collected at that scene — a reminder that in Phoenix, an unsolved file is not a closed file. In the Bellemare case, police say it was new information received in 2026, not a new technology announcement, that moved the file.
The place: Maryvale, west Phoenix
Maryvale is one of Phoenix's largest urban villages, a dense residential area in the west of the city built largely in the post-war decades, with apartment complexes strung along Maryvale Parkway north of Indian School Road. Apartment-complex security guards in neighbourhoods like Maryvale typically work alone overnight — the circumstances in which Bellemare was killed — and his death was one of the cases residents and advocates raised for years when arguing that unarmed guards on night shifts face risks the job rarely acknowledges.
What happens next
Gerardo's case now enters the Maricopa County court process: prosecutors review the arrest, formal charging follows the county's normal course, and a court will set the schedule for first appearances and any preliminary or grand-jury proceedings. Police have not said whether more arrests are expected or whether the 2013 witness descriptions point to a second person. Anyone with information about the November 29, 2013 shooting at the Graybriar Apartments can contact the Phoenix Police Department; the department has said the homicide investigation that produced this arrest remains its work until the case is resolved in court.