Early on the morning of Feb. 16, 2026, deputies answering a 911 call found Carl Grillmair, 67, shot dead on the front porch of his home in Llano, a rural community in the Antelope Valley about 75 miles north of Los Angeles. Grillmair was a research scientist at Caltech’s IPAC science and data center, known for helping detect water on a distant planet and for studies of dark matter and the structure of our galaxy.

Prosecutors say that before dawn, Freddy Snyder, then 29, fired a rifle into the ceiling of his mother’s home after she refused to give him her car keys, took her car with two rifles, and drove to Grillmair’s property. Grillmair went outside after being alerted to a car in his driveway and was shot. Snyder was arrested later that day and charged with murder, carjacking and first-degree residential burglary. He pleaded not guilty in May.

There was history. Two months earlier, deputies had arrested Snyder on Grillmair’s property carrying a rifle. That case was dismissed, and he was released.

No motive has been made public, and it isn’t known whether the two men knew each other. Even so, Grillmair’s death landed on a viral list of 11 scientists tied to aerospace and defense research who had died or vanished since 2023, and it became one of the cases in a federal review of that list. Officials have found nothing linking them.