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She Waited for Her Daughter to Appear in the Christmas Parade—Then One Missing Teen Led Us to a Killer’s Hidden Secret

The call came in with a sentence no officer ever forgets hearing: “My daughter’s dead.” The woman on the other end of the line was trying to give dispatch her address, but grief was already breaking apart her words. The dispatcher asked what was happening, and she said it again. “My daughter’s dead.” When asked how old her daughter was, the answer came out confused—fifteen, then sixteen—before the mother broke down again. It was December 5, 2023, in Edna, Texas, a town that had been gathering that evening for its annual Christmas parade. Families were outside. Children were watching floats. And somewhere in the middle of what should have been an ordinary December celebration, a mother named Jacqueline Medina was waiting on the edge of the parade route for her sixteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, an Edna High School junior varsity cheerleader, to walk past. Jacqueline had rushed home from work around 5:22 that afternoon because she wanted to change her shoes before heading back out. She expected to see her daughter among the cheerleaders. She expected that ordinary moment every parent understands—the glimpse of your child in a crowd, the smile, maybe a wave, the little confirmation that everything is exactly where it should be. But the cheerleaders came by, and Elizabeth was not there. Jacqueline waited through the next part of the parade. She watched another float pass. Then another. She kept waiting because there are moments when a parent does not immediately believe something is wrong. You tell yourself your child is late. Maybe she got separated from the group. Maybe there was a change in plans. Maybe someone forgot to tell you. But the final float passed, and Elizabeth still had not appeared. By approximately 6:47 p.m., the question was no longer where Elizabeth was in the parade. It was where Elizabeth was at all. When officers arrived at the apartment Elizabeth shared with her mother, Jacqueline was already inside with the discovery that had turned an ordinary Christmas evening into a homicide investigation. She had found her daughter in the bathtub, still wearing the shorts and T-shirt she usually slept in. Elizabeth was sixteen years old. There was a stab wound on her torso, and investigators immediately recognized that this was not an accident. The apartment became a crime scene. Jacqueline was devastated and had to be moved away while officers began securing the area. She kept trying to explain what had happened, telling investigators that she had come home, called Elizabeth's name, checked the rooms, and tried to reach her friends. Nobody had seen her. Nobody could tell her where she was. Her phone had been going straight to voicemail. And then Jacqueline had gone into the bathroom and found her daughter. In a matter of minutes, the case had transformed from a missing teenager on parade night into a murder investigation. But what we did not know yet was that the person who had killed Elizabeth had left behind a trail that began before the murder, continued after it, and ultimately led investigators to a house nearly an hour away.

When I look at an investigation like this, the first question is not always “Who killed her?” Sometimes the first question is simply, “What was the last normal moment?” For Elizabeth, the answer seemed to be that morning. Her boyfriend had been trying to reach her since early in the day. He had messaged her around seven in the morning and received no response. Later, at 11:13, he sent another message. Again, nothing. That was unusual enough to concern him because Elizabeth normally would have responded if something was wrong. Her mother told investigators the same thing. Elizabeth would have called. She would have texted. She had not done either. When Jacqueline returned home and could not find her, she contacted Elizabeth's coach. The coach said she had not seen her all day. Her friends were also worried. Two of Elizabeth's best friends and her boyfriend eventually followed Jacqueline home because they wanted to help search for her. They knew something was wrong. One of them knew that Elizabeth's phone was connected to Life360, a location-sharing application. If they could access the last location of the phone, perhaps they could figure out where Elizabeth had been that morning. When they looked, the location raised a question that changed the direction of the investigation. At 10:17 a.m., Elizabeth's phone had registered on County Road 406, roughly half a mile from the apartment. It was not where they expected it to be. That timestamp suddenly mattered. Investigators began working backward. If Elizabeth's phone had been there at 10:17, what happened afterward? Was Elizabeth ever actually at that location? Had someone taken her phone? Was the location accurate? And why had the phone stopped communicating? Officers went to the house associated with the last location, approaching it as a potential lead rather than assuming they had found the killer. The house was empty and for sale. Officers entered and cleared it, checking rooms and hallways while repeatedly calling out. But there was no Elizabeth and no obvious phone. The lead appeared to go nowhere. Yet the timestamp remained. A device had been somewhere else at 10:17 that morning, and investigators now had another piece of information to put beside the physical evidence from the apartment.

The physical evidence inside Elizabeth's bathroom was beginning to tell its own story. Investigators examining her body noticed multiple stab wounds, and what struck them was not only the number of wounds but the lack of blood throughout much of the apartment. Her shirt was badly torn, with additional stab damage. Her body was wet. Her left hand still had a religious bracelet associated with a Catholic saint. Near the lower portion of the shower curtain, investigators found blood. They observed what looked like repeated smears running from the upper crease downward toward the area where Elizabeth's body had been placed. The shower curtain had not simply been lying beneath her; the pattern suggested movement. Investigators began considering the possibility that Elizabeth had been placed into the bathtub after the attack and that the shower had been turned on afterward, potentially in an attempt to alter or conceal evidence. But a theory was still only a theory. What investigators needed was something that connected the bathroom to a person. They began knocking on doors in the apartment complex, asking neighbors what they had heard that morning. That was when another piece of the timeline emerged. An upstairs neighbor remembered hearing a loud crash sometime between approximately 10:00 and noon. She described the sound as something falling or being knocked over. She got up and moved through her apartment to make sure nothing had been disturbed. Then, when she returned toward her bedroom, she heard another crash. Shortly afterward, she heard the shower running in the master bedroom. She estimated the shower remained on for somewhere around fifteen to twenty minutes. What she did not hear was screaming. Her dog, normally extremely alert to noises, did not begin barking. That absence was significant, but it did not prove what had happened inside the apartment below. The neighbor also had something far more valuable than a memory: a camera. A balcony camera faced toward the area outside, recording people and vehicles throughout the day. She told investigators they could take the footage from the SD card. Suddenly the investigation had a timeline supported by more than one source. Elizabeth's phone showed a location at 10:17. The neighbor heard crashes around that same general period. She heard the shower afterward. Investigators now had a reason to focus intensely on what happened around ten o'clock that morning.

The next clue came from the camera. Two days later, on December 7, investigators reviewed the neighbor's surveillance footage. At approximately 10:16 a.m., just after the time the neighbor remembered hearing the crashes and before or around the beginning of the shower, a man appeared running from the building. He got into a Ford Taurus and drove away. That was the first clear image of someone leaving the area around the estimated time of Elizabeth's death. Investigators showed the man's image to Jacqueline. She did not recognize him. That did not mean the image was useless. Screenshots were distributed to the media while detectives continued speaking with Elizabeth's friends and family. For several days, leads came into Crime Stoppers, but none produced an immediate breakthrough. The case had a victim, a timeline, a suspicious vehicle, and a photograph of a man investigators could not yet identify. And there was another problem: Elizabeth's phone was still missing. If the killer had taken it, the phone might contain information about where he went afterward. But the phone was not simply sitting at the last known location. It had disappeared. Then, four days after Elizabeth was killed, something happened at a vigil held in Elizabeth's memory. Texas Ranger Brandt Johnston was there when he overheard a detail that made him stop and listen. Both a friend of Elizabeth's and Elizabeth's boyfriend had received responses from Elizabeth's phone. That should have been impossible. Elizabeth was dead. Her phone had been missing. Yet someone was apparently answering messages from it. The friend explained that she had texted Elizabeth earlier that evening. The message had been answered “okay.” Investigators asked her to send another message while they watched. She did. The response behavior made the situation even stranger. Then Elizabeth's boyfriend came in. He explained that he had texted her that he missed her and received a response that appeared to come from the missing phone. When he called, someone actually answered. He heard a voice. The person on the other end then hung up. At that moment, the missing phone was no longer simply a missing piece of evidence. It was potentially active in the hands of the person who had taken it. Investigators requested emergency disclosure from the cellular provider to determine where the device was communicating. At 7:06 p.m., AT&T returned the location. Elizabeth's phone was pinging in Schulenberg, Texas—about an hour away.

The task force moved quickly. Texas Rangers, Edna police, and the county sheriff's office headed toward the location. When they arrived, there was a silver Ford Taurus parked outside, matching the type of vehicle seen leaving Elizabeth's apartment. Investigators ran the plates. The vehicle was associated with twenty-three-year-old Raphael Goa Romero. His history included a prior burglary involving a building. That detail became especially important because Jacqueline had told investigators that the apartment had been burglarized only a few weeks earlier. She remembered that her watch and Elizabeth's projector had been taken, along with other belongings. She had initially wondered whether those burglars might have returned. Now investigators had a man with a burglary history, a vehicle resembling the one seen leaving the apartment on the morning of Elizabeth's murder, and a phone associated with Elizabeth communicating from a location connected to him. But evidence still had to be established. When investigators approached Romero's home, they learned that he lived there with his mother, father, and siblings. There was also a language barrier; Romero spoke some English, but not enough for a detailed interview, so a translator was brought in. Investigators explained that they were looking into a crime and believed he might have information. They asked whether they could search his room for a cell phone. Permission was given. One officer began looking while another called Elizabeth's number. Then they heard a phone ring inside the house. It was in the brother's room. A family member said it was an old phone used for games. But when investigators looked at it, something immediately stood out. The device contained messages that had been sent to Elizabeth. “I miss you.” “Good morning.” “I hugged your mom today.” “Want to go to the gym?” Those were not random messages. They were communications from Elizabeth's friends and boyfriend, appearing on a phone that the family said had only recently been given to one of the brothers. The explanations did not line up. One person said the phone came from one brother. Another said it came from another. Then someone said it had been found while cleaning. Investigators kept asking the same question: where did the phone come from? Eventually they learned that the brother had supposedly received it from Raphael that day. The contradictions were becoming impossible to ignore. Investigators suspected the SIM card from Elizabeth's phone had been removed and placed into another device so the person holding it could continue receiving messages while hiding the original phone. That suspicion became much stronger when they continued searching the house.

What happened next changed the investigation from a case built around circumstantial connections into something much more direct. Investigators found the original phone belonging to Elizabeth. It was hidden in the house. They recognized it from photographs. At the same time, the search of Romero's room revealed far more than one phone. Investigators found numerous pairs of women's underwear beneath a pillow and hidden in a closet. They found journals. They found clothing matching what the man seen leaving Elizabeth's apartment appeared to have been wearing. They found shoes and other items that investigators believed could connect him to the scene. They also discovered property hidden in a vent, including items that appeared potentially connected to the earlier burglary at Jacqueline and Elizabeth's apartment. Buried deeper inside that vent was Elizabeth's wallet. At that point, the investigation had expanded beyond the question of who killed Elizabeth. Investigators began considering whether Romero might have been involved in other burglaries or thefts and whether the murder had grown out of behavior that had started weeks earlier. The journals provided another disturbing piece of the puzzle. According to the transcript, investigators translated writings describing a fixation on stealing women's underwear, entering homes, and watching women. One passage described wanting underwear from a woman and another described wanting to install a camera to see women naked. Those writings did not by themselves establish what happened to Elizabeth, but they gave investigators context for the items they were finding and for Romero's own behavior. Meanwhile, at the station, Ranger Johnston was interviewing him. Romero initially denied being at the apartment. Then he admitted being there. He said he had found the phone on top of a car and simply ran away with it. But the investigator knew the phone had been found inside the house, and he confronted Romero about the changing story. “When we started this off, you hadn't been to the apartment complex. Now you've been to the apartment complex.” The lies were becoming part of the evidence. Finally, the investigator told him that Elizabeth's SIM card had been put into the phone. Romero was given a chance to explain. He continued to deny responsibility. Then the investigator told him that someone had seen him running from the building. He asked why Romero had been inside. Romero's story kept changing. He said he had not entered apartments. Then he admitted he had been there. He had the phone. He had been seen leaving. And investigators now had Elizabeth's wallet and other suspected stolen property in his room.

Eventually, the story Romero gave investigators became more specific. He said he had gone to Elizabeth's apartment and knocked on the door looking for drugs. According to the account given through translation, he thought Elizabeth was very pretty and asked for her phone number. She said no. He became angry. What happened after that was the part he repeatedly claimed he could not remember. Investigators asked whether they fought. They asked whether he hit her. He said that after becoming angry, he did not really remember what happened. The investigator pressed him: “Why did you kill her?” Romero's answer was not an explanation of motive so much as a statement of confusion. He said the main thing he remembered was getting angry. He said he did not know why he did it. He said he was not that type of person. Later, he said that after leaving the apartment, he drove about ten miles before pulling over, apparently trying to process what had just happened. The investigator asked him a question designed to force him to think beyond himself: if someone killed his sister, what should happen to that person? Romero answered that they should pay, just as he needed to pay. Then the words came that marked the end of the interview and the beginning of the formal case against him: “You are under arrest for murder.” But even then, there were questions that remained unanswered. Why had he chosen Elizabeth's apartment? Why had he returned there? Why had he targeted that particular home? Why did a burglary weeks earlier matter? Why were women's undergarments hidden in his room? Why had Elizabeth's phone been taken, its SIM card apparently transferred, and the original device hidden? Investigators later brought Romero back to the apartment for a walk-through in an effort to jog his memory. He repeated that he had knocked on the door looking for drugs and that Elizabeth had let him in. He remembered telling her she was pretty and asking for her number. He remembered becoming angry when she refused. But when investigators walked him through the apartment, his memory remained fragmented. He remembered portions of the bedroom. He remembered Elizabeth lying in the bathtub with the water running. But when asked whether he turned the water on, he said he did not remember. Asked whether he stabbed her while she was in the tub, he again said he did not remember. Investigators were left with a disturbing combination: physical evidence, digital evidence, stolen property, the surveillance footage, his changing statements, and a confession-like account that still contained major gaps in his claimed memory.

The deeper investigators went, the more the case appeared to extend beyond December 5. Romero eventually admitted that he had broken into Jacqueline and Elizabeth's apartment on November 13, several weeks before Elizabeth was killed. He said he returned on December 5 looking for more underwear. That admission connected the earlier burglary to the later murder investigation in a way that Jacqueline could never have known when she first told officers that someone had robbed them. She had been trying to explain why the apartment door might have been unlocked. She remembered the theft of her watch and Elizabeth's projector. She had wondered whether the same burglars might have returned. At the time, that was simply a possibility. Investigators had no reason to assume the earlier burglary and the murder were connected. But the later evidence changed the meaning of those details. Romero's journals described his fixation on women's underwear. Investigators found numerous pairs in his room. They found stolen property and house keys. They found Elizabeth's wallet. They found the phone. They found clothing associated with the surveillance image. And Romero eventually acknowledged returning to the apartment because he wanted to steal more underwear. The case therefore became more than a story about a teenage cheerleader who disappeared before a Christmas parade. It became a story about a pattern of behavior that had apparently been developing before anyone knew Elizabeth was in danger. That is one of the hardest realities in an investigation: the victim often has no idea she has become part of someone else's pattern. Elizabeth did not wake up on December 5 knowing that a man who had previously entered her home would return. Her mother did not know. Her friends did not know. The people at the Christmas parade certainly did not know. They were simply waiting for a cheerleader to walk past. Meanwhile, according to the evidence described in the case, the person responsible had already been connected to their home through an earlier burglary and had developed a fixation that investigators later discovered in his writings and possessions.

On December 12, investigators took Romero back to Elizabeth's apartment one more time, trying to reconstruct the sequence of events. He walked through the rooms and repeated portions of his account. He said he had knocked on the door looking for drugs. He described Elizabeth letting him in. He remembered asking for her number and becoming angry when she refused. He remembered being in the apartment. He remembered the bathroom. He remembered Elizabeth in the tub with the water running. But when detectives asked the questions that mattered most—when exactly did he attack her, did he stab her inside the tub, did he turn on the shower afterward—he repeatedly said he did not remember. The investigators were frustrated because they wanted to understand not only what happened but why. Romero said he felt bad. He said he felt sad. But he never gave them a complete explanation for why he chose Elizabeth, why the anger became violence, or why the attack happened in the way it did. That absence of explanation is important. A criminal case can establish responsibility without providing a satisfying answer to every question a family has. Jacqueline could eventually learn who killed her daughter. She could learn how investigators connected the phone, the car, the apartment, the stolen property, the surveillance footage, and Romero himself. She could hear his own statements about becoming angry after Elizabeth rejected his request for her phone number. But she could not necessarily receive the one answer a grieving mother might want most: why her daughter? There is a difference between solving a homicide and explaining it emotionally. Investigators can reconstruct movements. They can recover digital evidence. They can translate journals. They can compare clothing and vehicles. They can locate a stolen phone. They can obtain a confession or guilty plea. But none of those things can restore the sixteen-year-old girl who should have been walking with the cheerleaders that evening. The Christmas parade continued. The investigation continued. The legal process continued. But for Jacqueline, the ordinary life that existed before the final float passed was gone.

In September 2025, according to the source, Raphael Goa Romero pleaded guilty to Elizabeth Medina's murder as well as aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and burglary of a habitation. He received two life sentences plus an additional twenty years. The legal outcome answered the question of who was responsible, but it did not answer every question left behind at the apartment. It did not explain exactly what happened during the minutes Romero claimed he could not remember. It did not tell Jacqueline why her daughter became the target that morning. And it could not change the fact that on December 5, 2023, Jacqueline had gone to a Christmas parade expecting to see her daughter and instead ended the night standing outside an apartment while officers investigated a homicide. What stays with me about the case is the way the investigation began with absence. Elizabeth was absent from the parade. Then her phone was absent. Then the killer was absent. There was no obvious suspect waiting at the scene. The apartment did not immediately tell investigators who had been there. But little pieces of that absence began to speak. A phone location at 10:17. A crash heard by an upstairs neighbor. A shower running for fifteen or twenty minutes. A camera capturing a man leaving. A silver Ford Taurus. A phone suddenly answering messages days after Elizabeth's death. A cellular ping nearly an hour away. A family member receiving a phone from his brother. A ring inside a bedroom. Contradictory explanations. Elizabeth's actual phone hidden in the house. Her wallet in a vent. Stolen property. Journals. Clothing. And finally, a young man sitting across from an investigator saying that he remembered becoming angry but could not explain why he killed her. The evidence did what grief could not. It reconstructed the path. It showed that the night had not begun with murder. It began with a mother changing her shoes and hurrying back outside to watch her daughter in a Christmas parade. It ended with investigators carrying away evidence and a family beginning a life without Elizabeth. And somewhere between those two moments was the hidden connection: the missing girl was not simply missing from the parade. She had been pulled into a pattern that investigators later traced through burglary, stolen property, the missing phone, the surveillance footage, and the suspect's own statements. Jacqueline eventually learned who took her daughter. But even after the conviction, one question remained where the investigation could not completely reach: why Elizabeth? And sometimes that is the cruelest ending a case can have—not that the killer remains unknown, but that the truth can identify the person responsible without ever giving a grieving family the reason they needed to hear.