July 19--A Denver man has been charged in the strangulations of two women, including his half-sister, whose bodies were found during a suspicious fire on Chicago's Northwest Side in October, police said.
Adam Ruiz, 22, of the 1500 block of Harrison Street in Denver, was extradited from Colorado and charged with two counts of murder and one count of aggravated arson, police said.
Ruiz was arrested and charged after he admitted to committing the strangulations and setting a fire to cover up the crime, police said. He is slated to appear in Cook County court Saturday afternoon.
The victims were identified as Samantha Welch, 18, who was Ruiz' half-sister, and Celiacruz Reyes, 18, of the 100 block of Birch Street in Carpentersville, according to officials and the Cook County medical examiner's office.
Earlier, the medical examiner's office listed different ages for the victims.
The suspicious fire started about 11:10 p.m. Oct. 16 in the garden apartment of a two-flat in the 4500 block of West Parker Avenue in the city's Belmont Gardens neighborhood, according to Chicago police and fire officials at the time.
The Fire Department found the fire to be suspicious but did not make a determination on the fire's cause, and turned over its records to police bomb and arson investigators, according to officials at the time.
A canine unit indicated areas where accelerants could be present, sources said at the time. No smoke detectors were found.
