More than three decades ago, a Navy sailor was found dead in the backyard of a house he was preparing to move into.
Despite an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and San Diego Police Department, the death of Larry Joe Breen, 32, went unsolved for 32 years, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release Wednesday, July 13.
However, investigators said they had a breakthrough in the case when the agencies reexamined the case using investigative genetic genealogy, leading to an arrest.
A Tennessee man, Brian Scott Koehl, 51, is facing a murder charge in the death of Breen and will be extradited to San Diego, officials said.
In 1990, Breen was a petty officer and cook stationed aboard the USS Fox CG-33, officials said. He was found “slumped against a fence in the backyard” on May 25, 1990, with multiple stab wounds to his neck at a home he intended to rent at the corner of Nimitz Boulevard and Locust Street in Point Loma, a neighborhood in San Diego. His missing car was later found abandoned more than a “mile from the crime scene.”
Authorities did not release any information on how the two men may have known each other or any possible motive.
Koehl’s first hearing is expected to be held Thursday, July 14, officials said.
___
© 2022 The Charlotte Observer
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
