ALEXANDER COUNTY, N.C. — It’s been more than six years and still no trial in a high profile case in Alexander County.
Areli Aguirre-Avilez and his girlfriend are accused of murdering five people, including two children, in 2019.
Avilez has been in jail for 2,400 days while the victims’ relatives wait for a trial.
Channel 9 has been following the case and looking at why it’s taking so long.
Bernice Reyes showed Channel 9’s Dave Faherty pictures of her mother Maria Calderon and her brother and sister, all murdered at a home north of Taylorsville. She says she’ll never forget investigators coming to her home in 2019 to tell her the news.
“I was still in my pajamas,” Reyes said. “I just didn’t believe them at first. Like, how can you believe this is going on, you know?”
Deputies say the home where the murders happened was also set on fire. Five months after they found the two children, a hunter discovered the skeletal remains of Maria Calderon, Juan Mendez-Pena and Luis Sanchez in the bed of a pickup truck 70 miles away in Virginia.
The home in Alexander County is gone, but there’s still a single cross just feet from where the children were found dead.
Deputies arrested Aguirre-Avilez and his girlfriend at the time, Heidi Wolfe, but still, the case has not gone to trial.
“It’s really frustrating,” said Reyes. “It’s kinda hard to hear that whenever you feel like you’re not getting any justice.”
Defense attorneys say investigators wrongfully believed Aguirre-Avilez and Wolfe were involved in the murders. Calderon had taken out a restraining order against Aguirre-Avilez in 2018 after the two separated, claiming he had “threatened to burn down the house.”
Wolfe also confessed that she and Aguirre-Avilez went to the home, killing the children and their mother. But court documents say a judge dismissed the complaint against Aguirre-Avilez nearly a year prior to the murders and Wolfe recanted her confession.
“She was essentially there being interrogated and told by the detectives that even as a 16-year-old, she could get the death penalty,” said Joel Harbinson, Wolfe’s attorney. “So I think that scared her and it was a coerced confession.”
According to a court filing, attorneys for Aguirre-Avilez say he and Wolfe were at a party in Catawba County the night of the murders. Their evidence? Cell phone tower records along with several people at the party who say they were there.
Aguirre-Avilez has been assigned two attorneys from the Capital Defenders Office. In a court file for him, we could see that tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees have already been submitted in the case.
Harbinson, who is also court-appointed, says he was able to get the district attorney to release Wolfe on a $20,000 bond, even though she’s charged with five murders.
“Which you don’t see in a quintuple murder case without some indication that the case is not that strong,” said Harbinson.
Harbinson says Aguirre-Avilez did change attorneys more than a year ago, which may have impacted the case.
Meanwhile, Reyes says she had begun throwing out the notices she gets about future court appearances for Aguirre-Avilez and isn’t sure she’ll ever get justice.
“If he just walks, there’s nothing I can do,” Reyes said. I just have to kinda believe in God that he’s gonna take care of it because what can I do?"
We called and emailed the district attorney for comment about delays in this case, but we have not heard back.
Aguirre-Avilez is locked up under a $2 million bond. He and Wolfe will be back in court in March.
VIDEO: Alexander County murder suspect requests new bond hearing after 5 years in custody
©2026 Cox Media Group
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/LH3JSJEF3VBLRJLJQESEAG34AM.png)
