A cold case that sat unsolved for 13 years has produced an arrest. Phoenix police say 43-year-old Joe Gerardo was taken into custody in Globe on November 3 and booked into a Maricopa County jail on suspicion of first-degree murder in the 2013 shooting death of security guard Jeffrey Bellemare.
According to FOX 10 Phoenix, Bellemare was working as an unarmed, uniformed security guard at Graybriar Apartments when he was shot and killed early on November 29, 2013. The Phoenix Police Department has described him as a 59-year-old security guard, though a 2019 report from KTAR referred to him as 58 at the time of his death. A Silent Witness case file confirms the shooting happened at about 1:30 a.m. that night.
Accounts of exactly where the shooting took place also differ. The station's report places Graybriar Apartments near 55th Avenue and Indian School Road, while a separate account from ABC15 puts the complex near 51st Avenue and Indian School Road. Neither discrepancy changes the central fact: a man doing his job protecting residents was killed in the overnight hours outside the building he was hired to watch.
Years of Dead Ends Before a Break
Phoenix police homicide detectives worked numerous leads related to Bellemare's murder in the months and years that followed, but the case went cold without an arrest. A 2019 KTAR report, published when the case was still being publicized as unsolved, recounted witness accounts of yelling between a man, a woman, and the security guard moments before shots rang out. Two years later, in November 2021, KTAR reported that the reward for information leading to the arrest or indictment of two suspects had climbed to $2,000.
Those early witness accounts lined up with details in the Silent Witness case file, which states that a male and a female were seen running from the scene and getting into a vehicle. The same 2019 KTAR account said the pair fled in an older-model sedan with a vinyl top that may have had front-end damage — a detail investigators hoped the public could help identify.
New Information Surfaces in 2026
That long silence ended this month. Investigators told reporters they were provided new information about the murder of Jeffrey Bellemare in 2026, but did not go into detail about what that information was or how it led them to Gerardo, according to azfamily.com. Phoenix police have not disclosed a possible motive for the killing, and they have not specified what tip, evidence, or development ultimately moved the case forward after more than a decade.
FOX 10 Phoenix reported that homicide cold case detectives identified Gerardo as the suspect before his arrest in Globe, roughly 90 miles from Phoenix. He was booked into a Maricopa County jail on the same day.
A Family Still Waiting for Answers
The years of uncertainty weighed heavily on Bellemare's family. ABC15 reported that his son described his father as someone who helped protect the people living at the apartment complex, a detail that underscored the sense of loss felt by those who knew him as more than just a man on a nightly patrol shift. For a family that spent eight years publicly asking for answers before this latest development, the arrest represents the first concrete movement in a case that had grown cold enough to need a reward increase just to keep tips coming in.
FOX 10 Phoenix noted that its reporting drew on information from Sgt. John Buchanan and Silent Witness. As is typical in a case this old, many of the specifics — the evidence that triggered the break and any motive — remain outside what police have made public so far; Gerardo was booked on a first-degree murder charge.
