His mother says that federal detectives have found a new clue in the murder of a New Mexico musician who disappeared from a recording session at a motel under strange circumstances.
Zizarah Shorty was last seen living on July 21, 2020, at the Journey Inn in Farmington, New Mexico. Farmington is a small, friendly town in the northwest of the state, right on the Navajo Nation.
He was a guitarist who was 23 years old and had gone to the motel with four other people to record.
The exact details of how he left are not clear. At around 11 p.m., one of his friends called his mother, Evangeline “Vangie” Randall-Shorty. The caller said that her son left to smoke a cigarette and never came back.
She called her son’s phone, though, and the same friend picked up.
She told Fox News Digital, “She picked up and said Zach left his phone.” “I asked if he was back.” “No,” she said. Zach always has his phone with him.
Around 7 p.m. that night, Randall-Shorty went to the room to bring her son a pizza.
He told her one last time, “I’m going to finish this track.”
Police searched for four days before they found his body in a field on the Navajo Reservation. He was shot several times before his killer or killers left him there.
“I say ‘taken’ because he was found in Nenahnezad, in a field, on a dirt road,” he said.
That’s 13 miles away from Farmington, where he was last seen, and you’d have to go through Kirtland to get there.
This month will mark four years since the murder, but Randall-Shorty said that officials have given her new hope that justice will be done.
She told Fox News Digital, “The FBI called me to say they had a new lead.” “I’m just hoping and praying that that is the lead that we need to solve Zach’s case.”
They asked her if she knew a few names, and she said she did. Yes, she did.
“After the update from them (the FBI), I did get another tip, and I passed the information to them as well,” she added. “The same names keep coming up.”
The FBI wouldn’t say anything about the case because they were still investigating it. But Randall-Shorty and her lawyer are hopeful that police will find and punish the person who killed her son.
“In this case, there were witnesses in that hotel room who were with him before he went missing,” said Darlene Gomez, the free lawyer who is helping Shorty’s mother. “The family has given us a lot of leads.” A body was found. The town is pretty small. Usually, these are the first steps that lead to a case being solved.
Gomez, who runs MMIWR, a nonprofit that works to find missing and murdered indigenous women and their families, said that all the businesses on the street also had security cameras.
She said that as the case went on, though, several witnesses died.
Because Shorty’s body was found on tribe land, the FBI has the power to investigate.
They are offering a $10,000 prize for information that helps them solve the case and get the person guilty.
