The five-day search for the man police say shot two people at a Halloween party near Greeley — killing one of them — ended on Thursday, November 5, when a multi-agency team arrested Mamre Bojorquez, 20, Greeley police announced. Bojorquez is being held at the Weld County Jail on an outstanding warrant for aggravated assault, and police say additional charges tied to the Weld County homicide investigation are still pending.
Source: NoCo Herald, reporting Greeley Police Department
Police stressed that all suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The arrest does not close the case: the homicide investigation remains open, and detectives are still asking anyone who was at the party, or who knows anything about the shooting, to come forward.
The Halloween night shooting
The case began in the early hours of Sunday, November 1, at a Halloween party near Greeley, in Weld County, Colorado. According to the Weld County Sheriff's Office, a fight broke out between several partygoers and someone opened fire, shooting two people. One man was killed and another was taken to hospital; the sheriff's office did not release the hospitalized man's condition in its initial accounts.
Deputies identified Bojorquez as the suspected shooter. The shooting turned a holiday weekend party — the kind of gathering held in barns, halls and houses across Weld County every Halloween — into a homicide scene, and the search for the suspect became the county's dominant law-enforcement story for the rest of the week.
A chase, a crash and five days on the run
According to accounts of the manhunt carried by Denver television stations, Colorado State Patrol troopers tried to stop Bojorquez's vehicle after the shooting. He allegedly refused to stop, crashed on Highway 34 near Highway 85 — the main east-west highway through Greeley — and fled on foot. Despite the search that followed, he remained at large for five days.
Who made the arrest
Bojorquez was taken into custody on Thursday, November 5, by a team built for exactly this kind of case: the Greeley Police Department's Special Enforcement Team worked with the Weld County Sheriff's Office STRIKE Team, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Colorado Violent Offender Task Force. He was arrested on the previously outstanding aggravated-assault warrant and booked into the Weld County Jail, where he remains held.
Anyone with information about the Weld County homicide case can call the Weld County Sheriff's Office tip line at 970-304-6464. Greeley police have also asked people with information about this case to contact Officer Kevin Douglas.
What happens next
The next steps now sit with prosecutors and the courts. Police say charges related to the homicide investigation are pending on top of the aggravated-assault warrant that put Bojorquez in jail, and he will face court proceedings in Weld County. Until charges are filed and tested in court, every account of what he allegedly did at the party and on Highway 34 remains an allegation.
For Greeley — a fast-growing city of well over 100,000 people, built on agriculture, food processing and energy, with large immigrant and working-class communities — the case has cut close to home: a young man dead after a party, another in hospital, and a 20-year-old in jail. Police have not announced any further arrests, and the investigation, they say, is not finished.
Awaaz Punjab will follow the filing of homicide charges and Bojorquez's first court appearance, and will update this story as the Weld County courts set dates.