One January evening in 1991, an 11-year-old boy returned home and found his mother shot dead, lying in a pool of blood behind the front door of their Arlington town house.
Sandra Carrera died on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 15, after a single gunshot to the head. The 41-year-old single mother had spoken to her younger sister on the phone only an hour before she was killed. She lay in the front doorway at 2514 South Walter Reed Drive for almost nine hours before her only son found her around 6 that evening.
Police never found a suspect or motive for the slaying, said Detective Kevin Norwood of the Arlington police. He said there was no evidence of anything being taken from the home.
Now, with the urging of Carrera’s younger sister, authorities are dusting off the file and asking again for the public’s help.
“She was executed,” said Carrera’s sister SuAnn Burt, who was 25 at the time of Sandra’s death. “Based on the kind of person that she was, it does not make sense at all. She wasn’t the kind of person to incite violence or hate.”
Carrera juggled motherhood and a full-time job at D.C. architectural firm Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum.
She was kind, compassionate and nurturing — “as much of a mom as she was a sister” to Burt, who was 16 years her junior.
She was driven and “the kind of woman that people would envy — but at times, in private, she could be lonely,” Burt said. “She was pretty unaware of being a marvelous presence in a group.”
Carrera’s son was the “absolute apple of his mother’s eye,” Burt recalled. Now 29 years old and living in Pittsburgh, Burt said he was “doing well” but still struggled with the memory of his mother’s gruesome death. “He’s very private about all this,” she said.
After the slaying, Carrera’s son went to live with his father — whom Carrera had divorced three years earlier.
The divorce was peaceable, Burt said, and Carrera’s ex-husband was investigated but never became a suspect, Norwood said.
The Arlington police have no new evidence on the case. They are asking anyone with information on Carrera’s death to call 703-228-4152.
