The West Valley man charged in the 2011 murder of Evelynne Derricott will be in 3rd District Court next Tuesday for a final pretrial conference.
Rogelio Diaz Jr. is charged with first-degree felony murder, first-degree felony aggravated burglary and second-degree felony theft. He pleaded not guilty to the charges during arraignment in November 2016 before Judge Robert Adkins.
Following Diaz’s appearance in court next week, a jury trial is scheduled to begin on Jan. 17 at 9 a.m. A jury trial had been scheduled to begin this May but the dates were canceled at a pretrial conference in April.
Diaz was arrested in May 2016 in connection with Derricott’s murder after Tooele City police detectives used familial DNA testing and physical evidence. Familial DNA testing is a technique that matches samples of DNA evidence to relatives in the state’s DNA identification system. The state crime lab uses the test to identify a close, male family member in the existing database before investigators use traditional police work to narrow the list of suspects.
Tooele City police believe Diaz was burglarizing Derricott’s Tooele residence when she came home in October 2011. Derricott suffered 14 impact wounds that were consistent with a claw hammer found at the crime scene.
DNA samples obtained from the hammer and Derricott’s car, which was stolen and abandoned in Kearns, were a match, but belonged to an unidentified male. The familial DNA test found a partial match to a relative in Diaz’s family already in the state’s DNA database.
Police were able to eliminate other family members who were already in the state DNA database or outside the country at the time of Derricott’s murder.
After narrowing in on Diaz, police obtained DNA samples from a used energy drink can and work gloves that he discarded. The DNA profile from the can and gloves matched the DNA found on the hammer and steering wheel and Diaz was arrested.