BERKS COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) – A discarded cigarette in New Jersey has led to the arrest in a Berks County cold case.

The Berks County District Attorney’s office says Vallis Slaughter is facing charges including murder and criminal conspiracy to commit homicide in connection to the fatal 2012 diner shooting death of Julio Torres.

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The District Attorney’s office says on March 24, 2012 Torres was fatally shot outside the West Reading Diner after a dispute between two men. One of the men was identified as Jomaine Case, however, he was not identified as the shooter. Case was later convicted in connection to the shooting.

At the diner, investigators collected a Styrofoam cup with a bitten-off piece from the scene for DNA evidence. A picture of the alleged shooter taken during a party before the shooting was also obtained as part of the investigation.

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After years of going unsolved, investigators reopened the investigation in 2023 and used facial-recognition software to identify the person in the picture as Vallis Slaughter of Brooklyn.

Slaughter was found to be residing in Jersey City and surveillance was conducted at a residence in New Jersey. There, investigators obtained a cigarette butt discarded by Slaughter and say the DNA matched that to the bitten-off piece of Styrofoam cup.

Cold-Case-West-Reading-DinerDownload

Slaughter was taken into custody on March 20, 2024 in New Jersey and remains in the Hudson County New Jersey Correction Facility awaiting extradition.

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