KEARNS, Utah, March 10, 2021 (Gephardt Daily) — Officials have identified a man killed in a shooting in Kearns Tuesday afternoon.
The deceased is Alonso Gerardo Garcia-Mendoza, 32, from Kearns, according to a tweet from Unified Police Department Wednesday afternoon.
UPD Detective Ken Hansen said Garcia-Mendoza the was killed about 4 p.m. when someone in a red Saturn opened fire on a blue BMW in the parking lot of a church ward house at 5305 West 5400 South.
Garcia-Mendoza, the BMW’s driver, was mortally wounded, causing the vehicle to hit a wall on the west side of the parking lot.
Passengers jumped from the BMW and fled north before carjacking a white Dodge Dart or Charger, according to Hansen. The male driver of the Dodge was shot in the carjacking and an additional person was injured.
Police across the Salt Lake Valley remain on the lookout for both the red Saturn and the white Dodge Dart or Charger. Hansen said the Saturn was carrying as many as four people. It was unclear how many people were in the carjacked Dodge.
Hansen stressed police have many unanswered questions as the investigation took a strange twist right from the start.
“The call came in as a traffic accident,” Hansen said. Police then realized it was a violent crime scene. “It’s not very often that you have possible victims of a shooting leave that scene, carjacking another vehicle and shooting another person.”
Hansen said it’s unknown whether the occupants of any of the three cars knew each other.
“This is really a tragic situation when it occurs in a neighborhood like this,” Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said. “People are coming and going to work, and they just want a safe neighborhood, and then to have something like this happens — we take really serious and we want to find out what happened, and apprehend who’s ever involved.”
Gephardt Daily will have more on this developing story as information is made available.
