A New York court has sentenced Joseph Martinez, the Bronx amateur astronomer widely known as Jupiter Joe, to 25 years to life in prison for the 1999 murder of 13-year-old Minerliz Soriano. Handing down the punishment, the court described the victim as a girl who had a bright future that was stolen from her, and said it had weighed all the factors in the case before deciding the sentence. The term was imposed as 25 years to life on the first count and 25 years to life on the second count, to be served concurrently.
The crime dates back to a cold February day in 1999, when Minerliz, a 13-year-old who lived in the Pelham Parkway area of the Bronx, disappeared on her way home. On the day she vanished she had decided to skip an after-school reading program she usually attended, parting from a close friend who later recalled hugging her goodbye. When she failed to arrive at her apartment, her mother and stepfather reported her missing, and detectives began canvassing a residential neighborhood with few surveillance cameras.
About a week later the search ended in the worst possible way. The body of the 13-year-old was discovered in a dumpster behind a video store in the Baychester area, near the Co-op City section of the Bronx and roughly two miles from her home. She had been killed, and investigators recovered biological evidence, including semen on her clothing, that would become central to the case. For the family, the discovery turned a frantic search into decades of grief.
Despite that evidence, the case went cold. The DNA recovered from the scene was run through federal, state and city databases without producing a match, because those databases at the time only held the profiles of men who already had criminal records. If the killer had no prior record, there would be no direct hit, and for years the investigation stalled with detectives unable to place anyone at the scene.
The breakthrough came through familial DNA, a technique that searches for partial matches pointing to a relative of the unknown suspect rather than the suspect directly. Investigators eventually obtained such a match in 2020, leading them to a man whose relative was in the database for an unrelated matter. That man had several sons, and detectives narrowed the field until they focused on one who had lived in the very same building as Minerliz at the time of the killing.
That man was Joseph Martinez, known across the Bronx as Jupiter Joe for his sidewalk and subway astronomy sessions, in which he set up a telescope to show children and passers-by the stars and planets. To confirm the match without alerting him and risking that he might flee, detectives arranged a sting operation, using an undercover agent who posed as a mother wanting to book an event with him, allowing them to obtain a sample of his DNA for comparison.
Authorities have said the case marks the first time New York City successfully used familial DNA to identify and convict a suspect, a milestone that they hope will open the door to resolving other long-unsolved homicides. For those who knew the victim, however, the focus remained on the girl herself, remembered as an innocent 13-year-old who loved reading and dreamed of becoming a poet, and whose family said they wanted her remembered as someone who was loved by many.