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A man is behind bars in Dallas more than three years after police say he killed a woman in a head-on crash after driving a stolen backhoe onto Interstate 35E.
Luis Alberto Lopez Guerrero, 24, was booked into the Dallas County jail March 13 on charges of murder and property theft. He had been serving an unrelated prison sentence at the time.
About 5:20 a.m. Nov. 27, 2016, a man stole a backhoe from the city water department on Walnut Hill Lane in northwest Dallas, then got onto the northbound lanes of I-35E while driving south.
A white GMC Envoy driving north swerved in an attempt to avoid the backhoe, but its bucket hit the front passenger side of the SUV, killing 20-year-old Lizbeth Suarez. The GMC’s driver suffered minor injuries.
The man in the backhoe ran off, leaving behind a Chicago Bulls cap and a trail of blood from a cut on his forehead, police wrote in an affidavit. Officers attempted to track him but a police dog lost the man’s scent at a nearby creek.
In August 2019, the affidavit says, detectives learned that blood collected from the scene was a match to a man serving time in a Texas prison: Lopez Guerrero. He had been sentenced to four years behind bars in late 2018 for a drug-possession charge in Johnson County.
Police interviewed Lopez Guerrero and he admitted stealing the backhoe that morning because he wanted to get to a hospital to see his sister, who was about to give birth, the affidavit says. He also described the hat left at the scene and showed detectives a scar above his right eyebrow from the crash, police said.
Lopez Guerrero, a Mexican citizen, was indicted on the charges in early March, leading to his transfer, court records show. He does not have an attorney listed in court records.