Arrest made a year after slaying

Man, 30, accused in Aldine-area death of beaten 64-year-old whose throat was cut

Jon Hoffman and Stephen Riner were best friends for nearly six decades.

The Houston men bonded over toy airplanes on the first day of first grade and were practically brothers from that moment on. Kelly Riner-Harmon said her father, who died in August in hospice care, spent the final months of his life heartbroken that he never had a chance to say goodbye to Hoffman — found dead, beaten and with his throat cut in his CB radio shed.

“He would cry,” Riner-Harmon, of Dickinson, said. “He would wake up in the morning and he would forget that Jon was gone.”

Adding to his pain was that Hoffman’s killer hadn’t been found.

“He was devastated that they had not caught the person who did it because Jon was the most generous, sweet man that you would ever meet,” Riner-Harmon said.

Deputies on Friday arrested 30-year-old Moises Renteria Carranza — nearly a year after Hoffman’s death on his brother’s property in the Aldine neighborhood, according to court records. The arrest was a relief to Riner-Harmon, who at one point canvassed the neighborhood herself to seek information leading to Hoffman’s assailant.

She looked to Hoffman, 64, as an uncle. Riner-Harmon was born without a right hand, and Hoffman, who years earlier lost the use of his arm, showed her how to drive a car and tie her shoe.

“He helped my parents cope

with that,” she said. “It gave them hope.”

Over the past 12 months, multiple neighbors in 13000 block of Lillja Road, near Aldine Mail Route Road, came forward to Harris County Sheriff’s Office investigators with information about the assailant, according to court records. Among the tips was that Carranza had been prowling that property and others in the days leading up to the gruesome Feb. 27 discovery of Hoffman’s body.

Police found a trail of blood leading up to a shed near Hoffman’s trailer and found the man on the ground with a slit throat, according to charging papers.

Hoffman’s brother David, who lived in a house on the same 2.5-acre property, said he had not seen or heard from his sibling for two days prior to the discovery. He went to the trailer that morning to check on him, but he was not there.

He and some neighbors then found him in the shed, police said.

David Hoffman and an investigator walked through the crime scene and determined that five firearms were missing from Jon Hoffman’s trailer. A denim jacket that he did not recognize was also found.

Investigators spoke to neighbors who recalled sighting a suspicious man in the area.

One resident said he saw a man hop over his fence, only to be scared off by his dog. That resident confronted the man on another occasion and asked him to leave after his daughter spotted him looking around the Hoffman brothers’ property. She and another witness saw him looking through the shed windows.

Within hours, the neighbor recalled hearing gunshots from another property.

Police believe that might have been from another resident firing two warning shots at a prowler. Surveillance footage from the encounter showed the same man that the first resident had described in the backyard. The man, now believed to be Carranza, made a run for the fence and a bayou after the shots, investigators said.

On the Monday before Hoffman’s body was found, surveillance footage and neighbors placed Carranza at a nearby gas station and taqueria.

Person-of-interest flyers were posted at the businesses. Months later, a woman reported to police that Carranza, a member of her family, looked like the suspect, investigators wrote. She had kicked him out of her home in July because he had been making sexual advances toward a teen relative. Police scoured a trash can in his old room for DNA evidence.

Evidence gleaned from a can of Pepsi later matched what was found on the denim jacket left in Hoffman’s shed.

Multiple witnesses, when shown a photo of Carranza, identified him as the suspicious man seen at the property, according to investigators.

An anonymous tipster then revealed that Carranza, a Mexican national, was still in the Houston area and working in construction. He was arrested in the 27700 block of Interstate 10 in Katy without incident, police said.

Officials on Saturday ordered that Carranza be held at the Harris County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail.