Son of woman shot to death in Springville charged with murder

The 23-year-old son of a woman shot to death Dec. 23 in Springville has been charged with murder after prosecutors accused him of firing a shotgun at her while they sat at the kitchen table.

Mike Lopez was also charged with third-degree felonies for committing domestic violence in front of a child and owning a gun as a restricted person.

Police went to a home near 900 South and 1000 East after one of Victoria Ramirez’s daughters called to report the shooting, according to a probable cause statement. Police found the 43-year-old dead in the home.

Officers found the alleged shooter in a downstairs bathtub with a shotgun. He was acting “unresponsive,” police said.

Ramirez’s 17- and 14-year-old daughters were also at the home during the shooting. The 17-year-old told police that just before the shooting, her brother looked at their younger sister and nodded. She said the 14-year-old and Lopez “started dancing” after the shooting.

Seeing this, the 17-year-old fled through the bathroom window and called her older sister, who called police.

“The seventeen year old stated she believes her fourteen year old sister knew this was going to happen because the circumstances she had witnessed,” the statement said.

The 14-year-old girl and Lopez, 23, were both taken into custody, according to a news release from the police department. The girl was injured while she was detained and was brought to a hospital.

Lopez was taken to the hospital, but was released and booked into jail early Thursday on allegations of aggravated murder.

Lopez told police “someone told him” to shoot his mom and it was like “deja vu” when he did it, the statement said.

The 17-year-old sister also told police that her brother had been “acting really strange lately,” saying he would meditate and claim to go to different dimensions.

During police’s interview with the youngest sister, the officer wrote in the statement that she, too, was “acting very strange.”

The girl told police, the statement said, that her mother wasn’t the one killed Wednesday. It was someone else, she said.

“I asked her about dancing with [the man] after he killed their mother,” an officer wrote. “She looked at me and smiled and stated she remembered dancing and then she was trying to recite the song for me.”