Jury convicts man of killing 4 tied to Omaha medical school

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — A former doctor was convicted today of killing four people with ties to an Omaha medical school, including the 11-year-old son of a faculty member there.

The Douglas County jury found Anthony Garcia guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. He now faces either life in prison or death – if voters opt on Nov. 8 to keep Nebraska's death penalty.

Garcia, 42, was convicted of fatally stabbing 11-year-old Thomas Hunter, son of Creighton University School of Medicine faculty member Dr. William Hunter; and the family's housekeeper, 57-year-old Shirlee Sherman, in 2008 at the family's home in an upscale Omaha neighborhood.

That case remained unsolved for years, until the 2013 Mother's Day deaths of another Creighton pathology doctor, Roger Brumback, and his wife, Mary, in their Omaha home. Roger Brumback had been shot and stabbed; his wife was stabbed to death.

Clues in that killing offered up similarities to the killings at the Hunter house five years earlier, and a police task force was formed to look into possible ties between the two events. Investigators said the evidence pointed to Garcia, who they said acted on his long-simmering rage over being fired by the two doctors from the medical school's residency program in 2001.