Murder charges were filed Thursday, in connection with the death of a William Penn University sophomore who’d been home from school last weekend when he was shot and killed. Tama County Sheriff Dennis Kucera says it happened at a rural Toledo home early Sunday morning.
About 30 people were attending a party at the time, the prosecutor says. Deputies were at the scene ten minutes after the 9-1-1 call came in, and they found 19-year-old Joshua Wohlman unresponsive, with a gunshot wound to the head.
Two Marshalltown men were arrested by sunrise that morning, but Assistant Tama County Attorney Rich Vander May says charges weren’t filed till yesterday. They accuse 20-year-old Luis Guzman Perez of first-degree murder, and a second charge is filed against 19-year-old Salvador Cruz, also of Marshalltown. Cruz has been held without bail, and the bond for Guzman-Perez is set at one-million dollars.
Vander May says since Sunday morning they’ve been going over the scene of the fatal shooting. A number of search warrants have been issued and he says they’ve recovered a lot of evidence, including a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun they think was “involved in the incident” that led to Wohlman’s death. Vander May says the gun was found by a resident near the Benton – Tama county line. They’re still searching for a second gun, a smaller one, they think was involved in the same incident. Within the same two-day period, five people were killed at their home in southeastern Iowa, and two others shot and killed in Hawarden.
Wade Kisner, who heads the Division of Criminal Investigation for the area, says there were so many violent deaths to be investigated, he had to recruit agents from Mason City and Davenport to help him. Most of the agents he usually has in Tama County had been sent down to Van Buren County over the weekend, so Kisner says he had to call some in from adjoining zones. “This weekend was one of those weekends when there were no boundaries anymore for DCI.”
Guzman-Perez and Cruz are scheduled to appear in Tama County District Court this (Friday) morning.