Left inset: Felipe Ayala (Springfield Police Department). Right inset: Suzette Flores (GoFundMe). Background: Police at the Missouri residence where Felipe Ayala allegedly murdered Suzette Flores while their three children were home (KOLR/YouTube).
A Missouri mother was allegedly bludgeoned to death with a hammer by the father of her children while one of their kids listened to the slaying unfold. Cops say the child was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher during it and telling them, “I hear banging” and then “she is not yelling or nothing anymore … I do not hear her anymore.”
Felipe Ayala, 34, was murdering Suzette Flores, 47, in the garage of their Springfield home Wednesday while the child was on the phone with cops, according to a probable cause affidavit. The boy”s 911 call came in around 11:20 p.m. and is documented by Springfield Police in the affidavit.
“I need somebody my dad is hitting my mother, I need a police officer,” the child allegedly told the 911 dispatcher. “I do not know what he is doing to my momma. I hear banging, she is not yelling or nothing anymore. It is just quiet. I do not hear her anymore. I do not know what he did to her.”
Police say the juvenile caller told dispatch “he is very scared” as he began to cry. The boy said he was “right by the garage” when the call came in.
“They have been doing this forever and I am tired of it,” the child alleged, as officers were being dispatched to the home. “I think my dad is coming,” he said. “Are they on the way ma’am? I am very scared ma’am.”
According to the child, Ayala had been wielding a knife before the incident and “kept believing people were out to get him,” the affidavit says. Ayala and Flores began fighting and arguing in the garage and the child told police he saw Ayala choking Flores and striking her in the head.
“You made me do this,” Ayala allegedly told her as the deadly assault was happening, according to the child. “Ayala looked at him and the other juveniles in the home saying they were next,” the affidavit says.
Three children were home at the time of the alleged murder and Ayala called them to the garage, according to the affidavit.
Police showed up around 11:22 p.m. and ordered Ayala to come outside. As he was doing so, cops “observed droplets of blood on various parts of Ayala’s body,” which were consistent with “blood transfer with velocity and not smearing,” the affidavit says.
An officer asked Ayala to provide the code to the garage door opener to check for the source of the blood, and once the garage door was open they saw Flores lying on the ground with her head “covered in blood.” The officer observed “fragments of skull and brain matter” around the mother’s head, and a hammer nearby.
“The striking end of the hammer was coated in blood and tissue,” the affidavit says.
Police questioned neighbors and one recalled hearing a female “screaming loudly something to the effect of ‘please stop,'” according to the affidavit. The neighbor said they looked outside and saw a male “pacing in the garage” and “hitting something on the ground,” per the affidavit.
“He could see the male, ‘beating something on the ground multiple times and pacing around the garage a lot,'” the affidavit recounts, noting how the garage was open and a truck was parked outside of it. “He said the male would walk around and then beat the ground a few more times and then pace around again.”
The beating lasted for 15 to 20 minutes, according to the neighbor, before the garage door was allegedly closed by Ayala. Investigators asked the neighbor, who identified Ayala as the male he saw attacking Flores, to re-enact the motion that Ayala was making and he started “making a downward motion from above his shoulder … consistent with a hammering motion,” the affidavit says.
Police arrested Ayala and charged him with first-degree murder and armed criminal action. He was being held without bond over the weekend while awaiting his next court date.
A GoFundMe that was started for Flores’ children says she “wanted nothing but a good life for her and her boys,” per the description.
“Her life was taken suddenly and viciously,” the GoFundMe says. “She was robbed of the chance to watch her babies and grand babies grow, and they were robbed of a life with their mother and grandmother.”
