Houston arrest leads to murder charges in Raleigh nightclub shooting

The man accused in a deadly Raleigh nightclub shooting is now back in Wake County custody, facing murder charges and no bond after investigators tracked him to Houston.

Giovanny Hernandez-Jaramillo, 35, was arrested by U.S. marshals and the FBI in Houston before being returned to Wake County, where he made his first court appearance and was formally charged with murder and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury. Court records showed he was being held without bond and under an ICE detainer.

The case stems from a shooting reported around 1:27 a.m. on March 22 at Patio Nightclub in the 3900 block of New Bern Avenue. Raleigh police said officers found two adult men with gunshot wounds at the scene. One of them, 33-year-old Jorge Dorantes-Carranz, died days later from his injuries. His family said he left behind a mother, siblings and a 14-year-old daughter. The second victim remained hospitalized in serious condition.

The no-bond ruling signals how seriously prosecutors and the court are treating the allegations. A murder charge tied to a nightclub shooting, paired with a second violent felony count, typically keeps a defendant from walking out of custody while the case moves forward. In this case, the judge’s decision also keeps Hernandez-Jaramillo in place as investigators continue building the file around the March killing.

The case had already widened before Hernandez-Jaramillo’s return to Wake County. Martha Renee Jones, 52, was arrested in Raleigh on a felony accessory-after-the-fact charge for allegedly helping him flee after the shooting. That arrest suggested investigators believed more than one person was involved in the aftermath of the violence at Patio Nightclub.

Raleigh police have not identified a motive in the available reporting, and the criminal case remains active. For Dorantes-Carranz’s family, and for a city still absorbing another killing at a busy New Bern Avenue nightclub, the arrest and no-bond order mark a shift from the chaos of the shooting scene toward a courtroom process that could take months to unfold.