County Attorney: The Cold Case of a Cold-Hearted Lover

He was supposed to take care of her. Instead, he left her to die.

That’s what prosecutors are saying 28-year-old Andres Bohn Reyes did to his fiancee, who was quadriplegic and in a wheelchair, and their unborn child.

Police arrested Reyes on Wednesday and booked him into county jail. There, he awaits two counts of second-degree murder for showing extreme indifference to the woman of his dreams and two counts of abuse.

The arrest caps a 3-year-old cold case from Glendale. On Feb. 2, 2014, Glendale police found Bridget Charlebois dead at 22 in her home on the 5900 block of West Olive Drive.

Reyes told investigators that the woman became ill and he didn’t know what to do, according to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

He told investigators he been trained on first aid, CPR, and on providing care to people with disabilities, police said in court records. The document adds that Reyes’ employer, Blue Thumb Staffing, confirmed his credentials.

Charlebois needed help. Ever since a childhood injury, she had to get around in a wheelchair. When Reyes came along, a romance bloomed, and Reyes moved into an apartment with her. He fired all her caretakers and took over the role, prosecutors say.

After that, things went from bad to worse.

Charlebois might not have known what police later reported in court documents: California authorities had a warrant for his arrest after he failed to appear in court there on a child-abuse case. Neither police nor prosecutors specified the details of the earlier case, saying only that he couldn’t be extradited from Arizona.

In Glendale, witnesses told investigators that Reyes would leave Charlebois on her own, sometimes for 12 hours at a time without any food, MCAO said. Then he’d shoot her with a pellet gun, knowing she was defenseless, Reyes admitted, according to prosecutors’ press release.

Police laid out in court records how Reyes shot Charlebois with a BB gun on at least two occasions between July and December 2013, citing witnesses.

Witnesses also told police that in the month leading up Christmas that year, Reyes abandoned Charlebois without food or water for 12 hours, leaving her to sit in a soiled diaper. The witness “rescued” the woman from what “her primary care physician described as likely to produce death or serious physical injury,” police said.

The night before Charlebois died, she was in medical distress, but Reyes didn’t seek help.

It wasn’t immediately clear what had happened.

The case languished as detectives and prosecutors tried to figure out what to do. Eventually, the case was turned over to MCAO’s Cold Case Unit in April 2016 because of its "complexity" and "the in-depth medical examinations needed to connect the victim’s death to the lack of care she received from Reyes.”

Police, in the initial jail booking sheet, recommended charges of first-degree, premeditated murder. Police said evidence existed to suggest Reyes was trained to call 911 and to start emergency medical response and that medical evidence found during the autopsy revealed, “proper medical intervention might have prevented the death.”

Charlebois died of "complications of remote blunt force trauma of the neck," according to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office, which ruled it a homicide.

Police also concluded that had Reyes reported the pregnancy, Charlebois could have been treated for a high-risk pregnancy and given birth to a normal child. The fetus was three months old at the time.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said in a prepared statement the case shows the value of sharing resources in complex murder cases.

Reyes is due in Maricopa County Superior Court for a preliminary hearing on Thursday.