Murder suspect caught after 2-hour Kennewick chase and neighborhood manhunt
A two-hour manhunt in Kennewick on Tuesday ended with the arrest of a man wanted for killing a teen.
The search started shortly after noon when members of the U.S. Marshals Service spotted the suspect’s U-Haul pickup in West Kennewick.
He led them on a chase through the Vista Field area before abandoning the rented truck in a parking lot on the 600 block of North Kellogg Street, near the Wells Fargo bank.
When the officers approached the pickup, they found that Marco Lombera, 21, had run toward some homes.
A woman left in the truck was detained by police for questioning.
Officers from Richland and Pasco and the Benton County Sheriff’s Office helped surrounded the area and a house on Lincoln Street.
Other homes were evacuated during the search as a precaution.
A police dog tracked Lombera to a different house on the 100 block of North Kellogg Street that he’d apparently broken into, said police. He was arrested as he left the home.
Investigators have been hunting for Lombera since last week in connection with the April 4 death of Reynaldo Rodriguez-Heranandez, 19, at an Eltopia home.
The teen had been shot three times in the head and his body was wrapped in a tarp and found in a storage room at a house on Tuck Road, according to court records.
Pedro Bucio, 32, lived in the house with his parents and disappeared before the body was discovered.
U.S. Marshals tracked him to the Econo Lodge in Kennewick, where they spotted him loading belongings into a Honda Accord. Police arrested him, and he is currently in the Franklin County jail on $1 million bail.
Investigators learned the motel room was rented for Lombera. According to court documents, he said he needed the room for a friend.
‘I smoked a guy’
Lombera was replacing the flooring at the Tuck Road home, and was at the house often, witnesses said.
Lombera let his connection to the shooting slip during a conversation with another friend and claimed he had “smoked” a guy, said court documents.
Lombera said it happened in Eltopia and that he put the body in a shed.
His story changed the next day, when he said that a friend had “smoked someone” because of an unpaid debt. He said the he needed tell the cops that he did it for a friend.
He pinned the shooting on “the guy he rented a room for,” said the documents.
This story was originally published April 14, 2020 at 12:55 PM.