EDINBURG — A woman once romantically linked to a man on trial for murder took the stand Wednesday to give her eyewitness account of the night she said she lost two men in her life.
Nancy Lopez testified that Victor Lee Alfaro, a man she was seeing, shot and killed her brother a little after midnight on May 4, 2016.
Twenty-one year-old Reynaldo Reyes Jr. was shot multiple times while in his bedroom at the Edinburg apartment the siblings shared, hours after spending the day with Alfaro, 27.
“I felt like I lost two things at the same time,” Lopez said of the shooting.
She told jurors she “didn’t think anything of it” when Alfaro walked into her room with gloves on, the 9 mm handgun she’d given him a month before tucked into in his waistband. Seconds later, she said she heard three to five gunshots from the direction of Reyes’ room. When she went to see what happened, Alfaro allegedly pointed the gun at her, apologized and asked if she would leave with him, according to her testimony.
Lopez told jurors she declined and Alfaro gave the gun to her before leaving the apartment. She took it, unloaded it and placed it on a table.
A motive for the alleged shooting remains unclear, with Lopez testifying that she had no idea why Alfaro would have killed her brother.
Although a downstairs neighbor testified Tuesday she heard people arguing upstairs moments before gunshots rang out, Lopez’s testimony gave no indication of such. That same neighbor also testified to seeing Alfaro flee the apartment shortly thereafter and drive away in Lopez’s car.
Defense attorney Hector Hernandez Jr. called Lopez’s version of the shooting into question, asking her why details she shared during her testimony weren’t included in the police reports from that night. He also pointed out her knowledge of how to handle a gun.
The defense also briefly alluded to Lopez wanting her uncle, Reynaldo Reyes Sr., an Edinburg police officer, to “pick up” Alfaro after the shooting “to see him, to spend time with him.”
Reyes Sr. is on the prosecution’s witness list and may be called to the stand later this week as witness testimony continues.
If convicted of the murder charge, Alfaro faces up to 99 years in prison.
