A 19-year-old man has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder in connection with the fatal stabbing of a Reston woman at Difficult Run Park in Great Falls on Monday (Aug. 17), the Fairfax County Police Department announced today (Wednesday).
Alexis Antonio Cedillos-Campos was taken into custody this morning in Prince George’s County, Maryland, after detectives determined he had “repeatedly” stabbed 42-year-old Carmen Lizet Puch in her car and doused her in gasoline, intending to set her on fire, police officials said at a press conference.
Through interviews with her family, friends and other acquaintances, investigators found that Puch worked at the same restaurant as Cedillos-Campos and that they were engaged in “an intimate relationship.”
While the exact circumstances of their relationship and how it may have motivated the killing remain under investigation, Police Chief Kevin Davis stressed that Puch “didn’t deserve this.”
“Our condolences to the Puch family and to Carmen’s friends and loved ones. The way that she was treated by this killer was reprehensible, to say the least,” Davis said, noting that Puch was the mother of a 3-year-old girl who’s currently being cared for by family members.
Officers with the FCPD’s McLean District Station were dispatched to Difficult Run Park in the 8800 block of Georgetown Pike at 6:43 a.m. on Monday after a man going for a morning run on a nearby trail called 911 to report finding a woman lying unconscious outside her car in the parking lot.
Police identified the woman as Puch yesterday, stating that she had been found with stab wounds to her upper body near a 2011 Honda Civic sedan registered under her name. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to Davis and FCPD Assistant Chief of Investigations Rachel Levy, Cedillos-Campos was seen on video picking up a “fixed-blade” knife, a pair of black latex gloves and a water bottle from the kitchen of the restaurant where both he and Puch worked.
It’s not yet clear whether he was at the restaurant for a shift, but police say the 19-year-old left the restaurant early Monday morning for a planned meeting at Difficult Run Park with Puch. He is believed to have dumped the water out and filled the bottle with gasoline siphoned out of his motorcycle.
Though Puch was found outside of her car, Davis says she appears to have been sitting in the driver’s seat when she was stabbed. She had been covered in gasoline, but the attempt to set her on fire was unsuccessful.
Following his arrest, Cedillos-Campos remains in custody in Prince George’s County, awaiting extradition to Fairfax. At the same time as the press conference, he was being interviewed by Fairfax County homicide detectives at the same time and had offered “a full confession for what transpired,” Davis said.
Though a second-degree murder charge has been announced, Davis said an aggravated or first-degree murder charge is still a possibility, depending on what detectives and prosecutors with the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office decide based on the evidence at hand.
“It certainly sounds premeditated to me,” the police chief said, pointing to the video footage from the restaurant, whose name and location weren’t released.
Multiple reporters at the press conference pushed Davis to address Cedillos-Campos’s immigration status after the Department of Homeland Security alleged that he had entered the U.S. illegally in 2024 near El Paso, Texas, but was released by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
Davis said he understands “the immigration question,” given the ongoing “conversation underway locally and nationally,” but he declined to comment on Cedillos-Campos’s status or whether he had any prior criminal history. A search of Virginia court records didn’t turn up any results for his name.
“When our detectives fan out and start collecting evidence and interviewing people of interest and talking to friends and family and neighbors and coworkers, they’re not doing that with the immigration status of anyone in their mind,” Davis said. “They’re trying to find out what happened.”
He added that he respects the duties of all federal law enforcement agencies, including those tasked with enforcing immigration laws, but their responsibilities are different from those of local police.
Among other questions, police are investigating whether a black sedan seen traveling on Georgetown Pike around the time Puch was killed has any connection to the case. The “vehicle of interest” was spotted on the otherwise mostly empty road in surveillance footage captured by a home in the corridor.
According to Davis, the FCPD wants to determine whether Cedillos-Campos traveled to or from the scene in the vehicle, and detectives haven’t ruled out the possibility of another person being involved, though there’s currently no evidence of that.
Levy urged anyone with additional information about the case to contact the department’s Major Crimes Bureau homicide squad at 1-866-411-TIPS or through Crime Solvers.
“The McLean community has certainly been impacted by this. The greater Fairfax County community has been impacted by this,” Davis said. “It’s received local and national news media attention, as it should, and our homicide detectives, our crime scene detectives, our victim services specialists have worked around the clock to begin bringing justice to Carmen and her family and friends.”
