Luis Omar Beltran-Mendoza, 27, has been charged with murder in the 2021 shooting death of 16-year-old Yeimy Beltrand.
HOUSTON — More than four years after the skeletal remains of a teenage girl were found in a secluded area of Wharton County, we finally know the victim’s name.
An autopsy showed 16-year-old Yeimy Beltrand had been shot multiple times in the head before she was dumped on County Road 225 near Hungerford, in the northeastern part of the county. A property owner discovered her remains on June 18, 2021, while clearing some brush.
Editor’s note: The above video originally aired in June 2021.
WCSO detectives were determined to give the victim a name, so they released photos with the hope that they would lead to her identity. One showed three silver rings found with the victim, and another showed the Disney character “Stitch, which was on her T-shirt.
“You would think by now, especially with those rings that were posted, somebody would recognize those,” Wharton County Patrol Capt. B.J. Novak told KHOU 11 in 2021.
Even so, the teen remained unidentified for the next four years.
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In January 2025, a detective with the Houston Police Department began looking into the unsolved missing person case.
He learned that Yeimy Beltrand’s mother had reported her 16-year-old daughter was missing in April 2021 after a caller told her she’d been murdered. The detective obtained a DNA sample from the mother and submitted it to a national database.
The detective also interviewed a friend of Beltrand’s, who told the Harris County Sheriff’s Office in April 2021 that she saw Beltrand’s boyfriend kill her. The woman said the three of them were on I-45 when Luis Omar Beltran-Mendoza hit Beltrand in the face. According to the witness, Beltrand then threatened to report him for unspecified crimes. That’s when Beltran shot her three times in the head, the witness told HCSO.
The woman said Beltran-Mendoza threatened to kill her, too, before dropping her off at a house where she was held against her will for a few days and finally released. The woman identified Beltran-Mendoza in a photo lineup.
The final missing pieces finally fell into place in June when the Texas Rangers were alerted about a positive DNA match that confirmed the Wharton County victim was Beltrand.
The HCSO cold case unit filed a murder charge against Beltran-Mendoza on August 7, but he hasn’t been arrested.