Jordy Husein Suljanovic convicted of 2018 double murder
Jordy Husein Suljanovic, left, was convicted and sentenced on March 14, 2023 for the 2018 murder of his wife Adriana Perez (center) and their boyfriend Omar Santamaria-Ruiz (right). (Harris County District Attorney’s Office)
A Texas man will spend the rest of his life in prison for the 2018 murder of his wife and her boyfriend, a judge ruled this week.
Jordy Husein Suljanovic, 46, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and an automatic sentence after an eight-day trial, according to Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg.
On Oct. 2, 2018, Suljanovic shot dead his wife Adriana Perez, 41, and her boyfriend Omar Santamaria-Ruiz, 33, in the closet of the couple’s master bedroom at their southwest Houston residence, the prosecutor’s office said in a press release Wednesday.
The accused caught his two victims in the act with a “secret” surveillance camera he installed in their home, prosecutors said.
Suljanovic is a refugee from Bosnia who worked as a truck driver. While driving, he monitored the camera image – while driving.
“When he saw his 41-year-old wife and her 33-year-old lover in the house, he returned home and killed them both, waking their children with the gunshots in the middle of the night,” the press release said.
After the murders, Suljanovic hired his adult son, also named Jordy Suljanovic, 22, to help dispose of the evidence.
The couple took both bodies and dumped them in Louisiana.
The younger Suljanovic pleaded guilty to charges of tampering with evidence in exchange for a five-year prison sentence last year, prosecutors said. He had previously been charged with a kidnapping, which was dismissed, Harris County court records show.
Santamaria-Ruiz’s body was dumped in the woods outside of Natchitoches, Louisiana; The son dumped his mother’s body near the Atchafalaya River outside of Baton Rouge, the prosecutor’s office said.
After the murders, the elder Suljanovic sold the Houston property and fled to Mexico City with his two younger daughters, his son and his son’s then 16-year-old girlfriend, prosecutors said.
The course of the investigation was not apparent from the court filings or the prosecutor’s press release, but law enforcement eventually caught up with the family. The older defendant was indicted by a Harris County grand jury in January 2019 on capital murder charges, court documents show.
Then the killer tried to move his entire family to Bosnia, prosecutors found. They made it onto a plane. They even made the first leg of the trip – but Suljanovic was arrested in London and flown back to Houston, where he was apprehended by local law enforcement and the FBI.
Harris County Assistant District Attorney Lauren Bard prosecuted the case alongside ADA Kim Nwabeke.
Bard noted that the elder Suljanovic had a history of abusive behavior towards his immigrant wife.
“She had been verbally and physically abused by him,” the ADA said. “And since she was born and raised in Mexico, she didn’t have her own citizenship and probably didn’t feel like she could go, she had nowhere to go. I’m sure she felt trapped, and she also had two younger daughters and probably stayed partly because of the kids.”
The jury in the case requested and received all exhibits shown at the trial, according to a jury note obtained by Law&Crime. Late on Tuesday, March 14, Suljanovic was found guilty and quickly sentenced.
Perez’s brother and Santamaria-Ruiz’s sister gave victim impact statements, according to Ogg’s office. These statements have not yet been uploaded to the public record at this time.
“This man has killed two people, including the mother of his children, and is trying to flee the country to avoid responsibility,” Ogg said. “We know that domestic violence can escalate into murder and that is why it is so important to seek justice for the victims in such cases.”
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