Harris County jury convicts man in Maria Jimenez Rodriguez murder case

A Harris County jury convicted Erik Arceneaux of murder on Thursday, July 2, 2026, ending a yearslong prosecution in the disappearance and death of Maria Jimenez Rodriguez. The verdict came nearly eight years after Rodriguez vanished. Investigators never recovered her remains.

Rodriguez was 29 when she disappeared on June 21, 2018. She was a Houston paralegal who worked at the Milledge Law Firm and was last seen after dropping off her daughter with a babysitter and heading to work. Her family reported her missing when she did not arrive at work or pick up her daughter, and her vehicle was later found abandoned on Port Street in northeast Houston with her gym bag inside and her keys missing. Texas EquuSearch began searching for her on June 24, 2018, from a command center at 2802 N. Wayside.

Prosecutors built their case from surveillance, phone records and physical evidence rather than a recovered body. Rodriguez’s phone and Arceneaux’s phone traveled together on the day she vanished and ended up at a Home Depot in northwest Houston around 6:30 p.m. Surveillance video showed a man matching Arceneaux’s description buying trash bags and a chainsaw. Investigators later recovered a receipt for those items signed Erik Arcenaux. Police obtained phone records on July 23, 2018.

Arceneaux was charged in August 2018, but he remained on the run for years. The Gulf Coast Violent Offender Task Force arrested him on Sept. 14, 2023, in a Walmart parking lot in southeast Houston and booked him into the Harris County Jail. He was 51 at the time of that arrest. A judge later overruled an earlier $250,000 bond amount, and the case went to trial in the 178th District Court.