JERSEY CITY (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) -- Law enforcement in Florida on Friday arrested the estranged husband of Jersey City kindergarten teacher Luz Hernandez, who was found dead in a shallow grave this week, prosecutors said as authorities searched for a second man in the case.
Cesar Santana, 36, was nabbed shortly after midnight Friday at a motel on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami by the U.S. Marshals Service in partnership with the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force, according to the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office.
Santana, of Jersey City, was being held at the Miami-Dade Turner Guilford Night Detention Center pending his extradition to New Jersey on a second-degree charge of desecrating/concealing human remains.
Authorities were still searching Friday for Leiner Miranda Lopez, 26, of Jersey City, on the same second-degree charge.
Prosecutors revealed Friday that Santana and Lopez had been stopped by the Kearny Police Department on Sunday—the day before Hernandez, 33, was reported missing.
The vehicle the men were in was unregistered and impounded by police, according to prosecutors, who said a court search of the car on Tuesday recovered evidence that led homicide detectives to a location in Kearny where Hernandez’s remains were found in a shallow grave.
An autopsy report Thursday found Hernandez was killed by blunt force trauma to the head and neck compressions.
Hernandez failed to show up for work Monday at the Beloved Community Charter School in Jersey City. A missing person’s report was filed that day with the Jersey City Police Department, which conducted a welfare check Tuesday at her home on Van Horne Street.
It was around that time that Santana was identified as a person of interest. A search warrant was then authorized for the vehicle that had been impounded two days earlier, prosecutors said.
After gathering evidence, detectives went to the area of the traffic stop in Kearny, where the shallow grave containing Hernandez’s body was located near Central Avenue and Third Street.
Hernandez and Santana separated in November, but he was still living in the Van Horne Street home, according to her family.
He is the father of her three children, who are now being cared for by relatives. Two of them attend the school where she taught.
Hernandez’s family and other mourners gathered Wednesday night outside her Van Horne Street home, where a makeshift memorial was put up.
“She was a beautiful person,” said her cousin, Yajaira Germosen. “We will miss her so much. I cannot speak, because it is unbelievable.”
Former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, who cofounded the school, said “Luz was a beloved member of the Beloved community.”
“She was someone who had a lot of good friends among other members of the faculty—a very warm person, a conscientious teacher,” Schundler said.
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