Woman’s search for brother ends; he turns up dead in Vegas

Tuesday, July 15, 1997 | 1:50 a.m.

Now, police in Las Vegas are investigating the case as a homicide.

Frank Herrera, an Albuquerque native who would have been 50 this year, was stabbed and strangled.

"I was hoping he was still alive. I thought maybe he had started a new life," Ms. Carter said. "But it didn't turn out that way."

Ms. Carter, a guard at the Bernalillo County Detention Center in Albuquerque, said she found a file Saturday in the Clark County, Nev., coroner's office marked "John Doe - 13th Street Fire."

Medical investigators knew Herrera was missing, but had no way of linking him to a 1993 John Doe case.

The person in that case was badly burned, his fingerprints destroyed.

But Ms. Carter recognized a tattoo on the John Doe's body while looking through coroner's office photographs.

Herrera graduated from Albuquerque's Valley High School and was an Army soldier during the Vietnam War, Ms. Carter said. He moved to Las Vegas in 1993 to find work.

Police found his body after a woman reported a fire. Unable to identify the man, the coroner's office held the body for four months, then buried him as a John Doe.

Ms. Carter said she last saw her brother a month before he disappeared.

She knew something was wrong when he stopped calling her in Albuquerque. She filed a missing person's report with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department soon after her brother disappeared.

Ms. Carter said she thought police regularly checked with the coroner's office as part of missing persons' investigations.

"I don't think they were ever looking for him," she said. "I've had to do all the research myself, all these years. But I never gave up."

A Las Vegas police spokesman was in a meeting this morning and was not available for comment.

Ms. Carter said she spent vacations hunting down clues about her brother at the apartment complex where he worked.

She put up posters seeking help, but said no one ever came forward with new information.

Ms. Carter said she decided to check the coroner's office herself.

Ron Flud, Clark County coroner, said that without help from Herrera's family, authorities never would have identified the John Doe.

Dental records confirmed the John Doe and Herrera were the same person.

"The family had been looking for Mr. Herrera for quite some time," Flud said. "Eventually, we were able to draw the two cases together when one of our employees remembered a case that matched.

"Getting the John Doe identified gives the police a new direction to pursue," Flud said.