Human remains found at Litchfield Park home after family vanishes

Human remains were found at the Litchfield Park home where Hector and Larissa Flores and their adult son, Matthew Flores, had been missing, and Avondale police treated the scene as an active criminal investigation. What began as a welfare check on Aug. 4, 2026, quickly shifted when officers entered the residence and searched the property.

Avondale police found two unidentified bodies buried in the backyard and a significant amount of blood inside the home, according to local reporting. That discovery moved the case out of a missing-persons track and into a death investigation with immediate forensic questions: who the remains were, how they died and whether the evidence inside the house matched what was found outside.

FOX 10 Phoenix identified Matthew Flores, 27, as the person authorities were searching for after the remains were found. azcentral reported that police believed the suspect had fled the United States. Local reporting identified the missing couple as Hector and Larissa Flores, and one local TV report that surfaced on social media said Hector Flores was a realtor and Larissa Flores was a teacher.

The next phase of the case will turn on identification and cause-of-death work, along with a timeline that links the welfare check to what investigators found in the backyard and inside the residence. If the remains are confirmed to be Hector and Larissa Flores, detectives will have to build the case through the physical evidence left at the home and any findings that place Matthew Flores before and after the scene was discovered.

What started as a request for police to check on a family became the recovery of buried bodies at their own home, with blood inside the house and a son now named as the focus of the search. The case now rests on the remains, the forensic examination and whether investigators can connect the Flores family to the evidence in the yard.