Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
Just before 4 in the morning on Saturday, August 30, 2014, a security camera inside a parking garage in Plano, Texas, recorded two people walking in side by side.
One of them was Christina Morris. She was 23, from Fort Worth, and she had been out all night with friends at the Shops at Legacy, a busy shopping and nightlife district north of Dallas. It was Labor Day weekend.
The other was Enrique Arochi, a young man she had known since high school.
They walked into the garage together. Nobody ever filmed Christina again.
A night out at Legacy
Christina had spent the evening at the bars and restaurants at Legacy with a group of friends. Afterward, several of them went back to a friend’s apartment nearby. Arochi was there too. He had told his girlfriend that night that he had a headache and was going to bed.
Some time before 4 a.m., Christina and Arochi left the apartment and walked together toward the parking garage, a walk of about fifteen minutes, prosecutors said. Her car was in there, a silver Toyota Celica. So was his, a black 2010 Chevrolet Camaro.
The camera caught them walking in just before 4 a.m. Minutes later, the Camaro drove out of the garage.
Christina’s Celica stayed where it was.
“We went our separate ways”
Christina didn’t come home, and she stopped answering her phone. Her family started calling her friends. Her stepmother, Anna Morris, called Arochi, the last person anyone had seen her with.
He told her that he didn’t know what had happened. He and Christina, he said, had gone their separate ways.
Anna Morris later told a jury that the moment he said Christina had walked off on her own, she knew something was badly wrong. Christina would never have walked anywhere alone at that hour. According to prosecutors, she told him: “We’re calling the police. Expect a call.”
The family reported her missing. Plano police found her car exactly where she had left it in the garage.
The stories he told
Detectives talked to Arochi again and again. Prosecutors later told the jury that he gave them one story after another.
First, he said he had not walked Christina into the garage at all. He had parked in a different garage, he told a detective. He was sure of it. He described the spot, near a pool and a statue, close to where a friend of his lived.
He said Christina had been on the phone with someone, talking loudly, and that he had been on the phone with his girlfriend.
Then detectives showed him the pictures from the garage camera: Christina and Arochi, walking in together.
His story changed. Yes, he had walked into the garage with her. But they had split up inside, he said, and he had left alone.
The phone records did not back him up either. He had not been talking to his girlfriend. And cell phone experts later testified that in the minutes after the Camaro left the garage, his phone and Christina’s phone were connecting to the network together, moving side by side.
The tower data showed something else. In the hours after Christina disappeared, Arochi’s phone had gone north, into the area around Anna, a small town in northern Collin County. Searchers combed that area again and again.
By then, investigators were looking hard at his car. They had one more piece of video.
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