MAN ON THE LAM AFTER KILLINGS HERE MADE MARK IN TEXAS TOWN
Members of ministry who bonded with newcomer proud he turned himself in
NEWPORT NEWS — It was an early evening last October that Amos Jacob “A.J.” Arroyo showed up in a small town in western Texas.
A local church ministry group was holding its weekly outdoor fundraiser — selling donated clothes, shoes and household items on tables in a parking lot.
Someone introduced Arroyo to the head of the ministry, Tammy Gibbs, and he began volunteering there that very night.
“He stayed late, and we went through all that stuff ,” she said. “Then he helped me again, and he started helping me so much nearly every night after that.”
Early on, Arroyo told Gibbs that “he was not gonna be here long” and was “just passing through.”
“I’ll be here for like three or four days,” he told her. “It doesn’t work out when I stay somewhere. God wants me to just travel and help people.”
But Arroyo, 32, ended up staying there, in Lamesa, Texas — a cotton farming and cattle ranching town about 60 miles south of Lubbock — for
more than three months, using the alias “Aren James Peters.”
And no one in this town of fewer than 10,000 residents knew “Peters” was a fugitive from justice — on the lam from a double slaying in Newport News and being sought by federal marshals.
Killings in Newport News
On July 30, 2017, Arroyo’s exgirlfriend, Patricia Morgan Joseph, and her father, Jessie Abraham Barnes, were in their mobile home in the city’s Denbigh section. Also there were Joseph’s two boys — then ages 6 and 1 — and her new boyfriend of a few months, a Navy man from Virginia Beach.
Everyone was relaxing and watching TV at the home, in the Chesapeake Village Mobile Home Park on York River Lane, south of Bland Boulevard near the Newport News airport.
Then, just before 6:15 p.m. that Sunday, Arroyo — the father of Joseph’s two boys — knocked on the door, police say. When Joseph went to answer it, they say, Arroyo began firing through the door, killing the 29-year-old. Then police say he came into the home, chasing the 67-year-old Barnes into the bathroom and shooting him dead, too.
Joseph’s boyfriend found a hiding spot in a trailer bedroom and wasn’t hurt. But he told a police dispatcher that he overheard the 6-year-old boy pressing his father with a question.
“Did you kill Mommy? Did you kill Mommy?” the boy asked. “Why did you do that?”
“It’s OK. It’s OK,” Arroyo replied, before fleeing from the scene without his children.
The next day, Arroyo’s car was abandoned in a Walmart parking lot off Interstate 95 west of Savannah, Ga., with surveillance footage capturing him inside and outside the store, federal marshals said. He was seen buying a backpack, a hooded sweatshirt and other clothing.
“He hit the ground running,” Bobby Mathieson, the U.S. marshal for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement. “The morning after the murders, he was already 500 miles away. By the time we found his vehicle in Georgia, we were a day behind him. Not only did he leave his car behind, we believe he left his old identity behind as well.”
It’s not clear where Arroyo went immediately after that, or where he was in August and September.
Showing up in Texas
It was mid-October that he showed up in Lamesa, Gibbs said.
He worked at the mission’s thrift store, including its weekly outdoor sales.
“She needed a workman, and he needed a stake in the new town,” said Tommy Barbour, 23, a church member who befriended Arroyo and worked a couple of home remodeling jobs with him in town.
Arroyo attended weekly services at the First Church of the Nazarene — the worship house related to the “Nazarene Missions Ministry.” He also began dating a young woman he met through the mission, and moved in with her.
Arroyo told Gibbs that he picked the town after hearing two men on a bus in El Paso, Texas, “say something about Lamesa,” so he Googled it and decided to go there. “Then he said the people here were so kind, so that’s why he decided to stay,” she said.
Gibbs, 58, said the newcomer had an easy rapport and good humor with people from all walks of life who came to the mission thrift store. “People loved him,” she said.
Gibbs said she shared a special bond with Arroyo, jokingly calling him her “adopted son” since he had the same mannerisms as her own son of the same age. She said he was the first mission volunteer she trusted to run the shop when she was at her day job.
“He worked harder than anyone who ever worked with me,” Gibbs said. “I said, ‘A.J., are you an angel?’ We were really close, and I felt like he was my kid.”
Still, she said, she suspected something was amiss in Arroyo’s life.
Gibbs said she and Arroyo would sometimes travel out of town to pick up donations — such as a bed from a town 45 miles away. As Christian music played on the radio of Gibbs’ pickup, she said, Arroyo would sometimes “break down crying.”
“He was just sobbing,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me what was going on … I just thought, ‘OK, he’s running from his past, trying to get over drugs.’ I had no clue … We would pray together for God to heal his heart. I knew something was really wrong because he was crying like that.”
Lee Lennon, the pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene, which has about 30 to 40 Sunday attendees, recalls Arroyo “just showing up at the church one day.”
“He was certainly a regular at the church,” and “volunteered at the mission just about every time it was open,” Lennon said.
When people couldn’t afford the steeply discounted items, Lennon said, “instead of selling them the goods they’d just give it to them.” The pastor said he once gave Arroyo $100 to help him out, and then watched him hand over $20 to a struggling thrift store customer later in the day.
“He would minister to people at the mission,” Lennon said. “He would pray with them.”
Turning himself in
But everything changed earlier this year.
On Jan. 11 — with the leads into Arroyo’s whereabouts growing cold — the U.S. marshals issued a nationwide alert looking for the man charged in the Newport News double killing. They called Arroyo “armed and dangerous” and said he was likely to be in California, Florida, New York, Texas or Virginia.
A few weeks later, the fugitive decided to give himself up.
On Jan. 31, Barbour — the 23-year-old who worked some remodeling jobs with Arroyo — said the two were helping a church member move furniture when his friend suddenly got a strange look on his face.
“He had the look that something was on his mind,” Barbour said. “I said, ‘Is something wrong? What’s up?’ … Then he said, ‘ I want you, Tommy, to help me turn myself in today.’ I was his good friend, and he trusted me … and he wanted me to be the one to help him do the right thing.”
Arroyo then told him about what happened that July evening in Newport News. “He told me that he killed them,” Barbour said. “He told me the straight truth about what happened.”
Arroyo told Barbour he felt “wronged” by his ex-girlfriend before the slayings, though Barbour also said he didn’t think Arroyo was “in his right frame of mind” at the time.
Barbour said he reminded his friend that nothing justifies murder. “I said, ‘You took two lives, that’s wrong,’” he said. “The most precious thing to God is life.”
Arroyo didn’t disagree, Barbour said, and seemed “at peace” with his decision to turn himself in — even knowing that he could spend the rest of his days behind bars.
“I was proud of him as a Christian for doing the right thing,” Barbour said. “He was very calm and confident about what he was doing. He knew what he was getting himself into, and he was at peace with that.”
Barbour added: “God gives everybody a conscience, and I think that his conscience was working on him, and since he was a Christian man the Holy Spirit was also convicting him.”
But it wasn’t easy getting Arroyo into custody.
Barbour first drove him to the O’Donnell Police Department, the next town over because Arroyo “wanted it to be outside of Lamesa.” But it was after 6:30 p.m., and the station was closed. Then they drove to a small “beer joint” in town, and Barbour used his cellphone to call the Lynn County Sheriff ’s Office.
“I got this old boy who wants to turn himself in,” Barbour said he told a woman who picked up the phone. “He’s a criminal and being chased by the law.”
But Barbour’s call was routed from the Sheriff ’s Office to the county jail and then back. People seemed to believe it was all a prank, he said.
Barbour got frustrated at the runaround and told a jailer at one point, “Dude, this is a felon who wants to turn himself in.”
‘Proud of him’
Finally, at 7:24 p.m., the Lynn County Sheriff ’s Office dispatched a deputy to take Arroyo into custody, with a plan to meet the two men at an Allsup’s con- venience store in O’Donnell.
As Arroyo and Barbour waited in the parking lot in Barbour’s farm truck, they had some time to reminisce on their three-month friendship. Barbour bought Arroyo his favorite candy bar, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and there was some “melancholy and sadness” about “leaving the good people he met in our town.”
“We were just talking about God and our friendship and leaving everything in God’s hands and giving praise to Him,” Barbour said. “And talking about how he’s going to be gone and how we’re gonna miss him and everything. General life things — what you would talk about when someone is going to go away and you ain’t going to see him for a while.”
The deputy showed up at the convenience store at 7:49 p.m., records show. “The sheriff said he knew that he was wanted in a double homicide,” Barbour said. “He was nice, but also let us know that he was very serious and was watching him.”
The deputy then told Arroyo to get into his sheriff ’s SUV. But Barbour said Arroyo asked to finish the cigarette he was smoking as the deputy made a phone call.
“Come on, man, can I have this last smoke?” Barbour said Arroyo asked. “While you’re doing what you’re doing. I ain’t gonna have one for a long time.”
“Yeah, sure, Bubba,” the lawman replied. “You have until I get off the phone.”
After the call, the deputy handcuffed Arroyo and took him into custody.
“I’m very proud of how he carried himself,” Barbour said of Arroyo. “That’s a Christian man if I ever seen one. There will be a lot of scoffers — ‘What a Christian, he killed two people.’ But God judges on the heart, and that’s in the Bible. The world doesn’t have to understand it, because we’re something different from the world. The world doesn’t understand the things of God. That’s just the truth right there.”
When people at the church and mission heard about the kind young newcomer’s arrest — and what he was accused of — the shock was immense.
“I sensed in him a humble spirit,” said Lennon, the pastor. “I never saw any arrogance, never saw any anger. I wouldn’t even picture any kind of thing that would create a problem in him. … I think he must have just snapped.”
Gibbs said she would never have thought the man she felt so close to could have killed two people months earlier. But as she’s come to grips with it, she said, she believes larger forces brought Arroyo to Lamesa.
“I think God brought him here so God could work on his heart to get him to turn himself in and do the right thing,” Gibbs said. That was spurred, she said, by the caring and kindness of the people in the town.
Wearing a mask?
But not everybody agrees that Arroyo portrayed his true self in the small Texas town.
“He’s manipulative,” said Felicia Nicole Contes, 24, formerly of Newport News and one of Patricia Morgan Joseph’s best friends. “He was just kind of like a different person behind closed doors than he would be (elsewhere). He’s very deceiving. … Down in Texas, he was trying to pretend he was a man of God so he could get himself out of trouble.”
Contes said Arroyo attended church services “now and again” in Newport News. “But I think it was all an act,” she said. “When I would come over, he would act nice and whatnot. But Tricia would tell me different things.”
“The people down there just met him,” Contes added. “They just don’t know him. Anyone can wear a mask.”
Still talking about him
After he turned himself in, Arroyo waived extradition, and was sent back to Newport News within days.
Now being held at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, Arroyo declined a request for an interview for this story.
His attorney, Shawn W. Overbey, said he’s advised his client not to speak about the case. The lead prosecutor in Newport News, Robin Farkas, declined to comment on Arroyo’s time in Lamesa.
Barbour and Gibbs both corresponded with Arroyo for several months while he was locked up at the Newport News City Jail, though Arroyo stopped responding to both a few months ago. In one phone call, Gibbs said, Arroyo said he was at a secure hospital after jailers thought — incorrectly, he told her — that he tried to hurt himself.
The case is set for a probable cause hearing Sept. 28, when a Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court judge will determine whether enough evidence exists to send the case to a grand jury.
While some church members in Lamesa have lost empathy for Arroyo after the arrest, Gibbs said, many others still ask about him.
“People really cared, and they still care,” she said, fighting back tears. “It hurt a lot of people when we found out about this. … People will come into the ministry and they will ask about him. They will tell me they are still praying for him. … We all make mistakes, and this is really horrible what happened. But that doesn’t mean we care any less about him. We know him as A.J., and we still care about the person we knew.” Dujardin can be reached by phone at 757-247-4749.