When he later found her dead, he panicked, retrieved a trash can from behind a nearby Safeway, and used it to take Valdez’s body out of his apartment wrapped in blankets.
“You know I killed my wife and paraded her around?” Perales later told officers, according to the affidavit.
Perales has been homeless for at least two years, according to Valdez’s family, who said they had heard about his alleged sick crimes from other members of the homeless community.
Thomas Perales allegedly killed his ex, then pushed her body around in a shopping cart wrapped in blankets.
“They’ve said that he was pushing her around in a shopping cart to get her from place to place,” Valdez’s brother, Adam Larson, told detectives, according to the affidavit.
Injuries to Valdez’s neck area were consistent with trauma sustained before her death, according to the coroner, although decomposition limited the preliminary assessment.
After she was reported missing when she didn’t return on Thanksgiving, Valdez’s family went to her apartment, where they found her door unlocked, her phone on her bed, her shoes still inside and her keys on the ground outside.
Perales has a lengthy rap sheet of domestic violence cases, and of repeatedly violating protection orders issued for Valdez and her children, court records and police reports show.
Valdez, a mom of three, had called the cops 67 times in the past two years.
In the most recent incident on Oct. 24, Perales tried to pry open Valdez’s front door with a knife and kick it in, while she called her mother, “scared,” and watched her ex-partner on her Ring camera, 9NEWS reported, citing a Northglenn police report.
The door’s deadbolt was “so damaged they believed it was slightly ajar,” while the Ring camera and peephole had been smeared with red paint, officers wrote in the report.
Perales was found nearby with a red paint marker and charged with domestic violence, violation of a protection order, criminal mischief and obstructing a peace officer.
He was sentenced to 12 months of probation and released from jail by an Adams County judge on Nov. 21, a week before Valdez was last seen alive.
Valdez’s family said they had been trying to get her to cut ties with Perales for years.
“We’ve tried so much to get her away from him. Every single time she went right back [saying], ‘That’s my kids’ father,” Larson told 9NEWS.
Police were called to the apartment 67 times in the last two years, including nine times for domestic violence, according to records obtained by 9NEWS.
Valdez’s three daughters are staying with her extended family for Christmas.
“Their mom was gone and it’s about to be Christmas. We don’t even know what to say to them right now,” Larson’s wife, Analisa, told 9NEWS.
Perales was scheduled to make his first court appearance on Wednesday.
The Adams County District Attorney’s Office is expected to make a formal charging decision shortly.
