Suspect arrested in North Dakota after Durham murder investigation

A Durham murder case that started on Guess Road ended with a fugitive in Ward County, North Dakota, where federal marshals took Carlos Anuel Medina Robles into custody without incident and charged him in the shooting death of Luis Alberto Flores, 28.

The case began just after 8 a.m. on Sunday, November 2, 2025, when Durham County sheriff’s deputies were called to the 6100 block of Guess Road. Investigators found a single victim dead from an apparent gunshot wound on the exterior of a business. The sheriff’s office said the shooting was believed to be an isolated incident and that there was no threat to the public. Later reporting identified the scene as a diner on N.C. 157, just south of Milton Road, in an area also described as Rougemont, about 17 miles north of Durham.

By April, the investigation had become a multistate manhunt. The Durham County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Investigation Division worked with the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Marshals Service to track Robles down after investigators determined he had left the state. The marshals found him in Ward, North Dakota, on Thursday, April 9, 2026. Robles was then charged with first-degree murder in the case, and extradition proceedings are pending.

For Durham true-crime watchers, the case now has the clean, hard edges that turn a homicide into a courtroom story: a named suspect, a named victim, a specific charge and an arrest far from the original crime scene. The distance from Guess Road to Ward County gives the case its own grim logic. This was not a quick local arrest; it was a months-long pursuit that crossed jurisdictions and brought together county detectives and federal agents before the search finally ended in North Dakota.

The shooting also stands out against the wider crime picture in Durham. Durham police said in March 2026 that violent crime had fallen 16.9% year over year, while homicides still made up 39% of violent crimes. Durham County sheriff’s mid-year 2025 data showed a 26% drop in its Top 8 Crimes compared with the same period in 2024. Against that backdrop, the Flores case remains a sharp, public reminder of how one deadly morning on Guess Road turned into a statewide and then interstate hunt.