by Patrick H. Moore
The multiple homicides just keep coming. This time, however, unlike yesterday’s shocking discovery of three dead black women in varying states of decomposition wrapped in garbage bags, the accused is not a registered sex offender living in a hardscrabble section of a decaying northern city. Rather, this time the alleged perpetrator is an Indiana medical doctor who apparently murdered the four individuals purely out of revenge for being thrown out of a Creighton University medical residency program more than 10 years ago.
Oddly enough, although several online news services have posted reports, not a great deal is known about this case at present. The bare bones of the case are as follows:
- The doctor’s name is Anthony Garcia.
- He is accused of killing four people with ties to the Creighton University Medical School in Omaha, Nebraska.
- Dr. Garcia is being held without bond on four first degree murder changes. His bond hearing will take place today in an Omaha courtroom.
- Garcia, who was living in Terre Haute, Ind., was arrested in Illinois last week and extradited on Thursday to a jail in Omaha.
- Garcia is accused of shooting and killing Creighton University pathologist Roger Brumback, and fatally stabbing Brumback’s wife, Mary, in May at the Brumbacks’ Omaha home. Garcia is also accused in the fatal stabbings of 11-year-old Thomas Hunter and the Hunter family’s housekeeper, Shirlee Sherman, in Omaha in March of 2008.
- Roger Brumback, the Creighton University pathologist, and the father of 11-year-old victim Thomas Hunter are reported to have fired Garcia from a Creighton residency program in 2001.
![Anthony Garcia]()
When the police were called in May to the Omaha residence where Roger Brumback and his wife had been killed, the forensic investigators noted striking similarities between the stab wounds on the right side of the victims’ necks and those inflicted on Thomas Hunter and the Hunter family’s housekeeper five years earlier. That similarity was described in the arrest affidavit that was unsealed on July 18th.
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In my job in Los Angeles, I have represented several doctors who ran afoul of the law by writing boatloads of prescriptions for medically unnecessary prescription pain pills — usually oxycontins. One of these doctors was actually charged with second-degree-murder because at least two of his patients overdosed and died. Through this experience, I’ve come to realize that doctors can be just as greedy as the next guy and are sometimes highly unstable. I’ve never represented a doctor accused of murdering people — and their innocent family members — purely for revenge, however. It will be interesting to see what is revealed as this case moves forward.