A 32-year-old man has been charged with murder in a road-rage shooting in New Mexico that left a four-year-old girl dead.

Police said Tony Torrez was arrested on Wednesday over the death of Lilly Garcia. The announcement of the arrest and charges came a few hours after police said a person of interest had been taken into custody after Tuesday’s shooting on a freeway in Albuquerque.

Lilly was killed after a maroon or dark-red Toyota sedan pulled up beside her father’s pickup and fired into the vehicle when they were driving along interstate 40 on their way home from school, police said. Lilly was sitting in the backseat with her seven-year-old brother.

The assailant and the Garcia family were heading west when one car pulled up to the other and the shooter opened fire, police said.

It was not clear what led the incident to escalate.

Police released a recording of a 911 call from their investigation. In the roughly minute-long call, a man is heard alerting an operator to a red pickup truck stopped in a median on the freeway and saying a man appears to be holding an unresponsive child.

 

Police say they struggled with the initial investigation and search for the shooter because of a storm that swept over the Albuquerque area soon after the incident, with witness descriptions of the suspect varying and a crime scene that could stretch two miles.

Police chief Gorden Eden called the shooting an inexplicable crime brought on by road rage. Interstate 40 would have been heavy with traffic at the time, he said, in the run up to the evening rush hour.

“We need the community’s help. You had to have seen something. Please call us,” Eden said Tuesday.

Mayor Richard Berry said Wednesday that the senseless slaying “cut to the core” of the community. The city is offering $20,000 for information leading to an arrest, while the FBI announced a $5,000 reward as the agency opened its own investigation.

The shooting comes after a road rage shooting last month in which police say a man fired at another driver in self-defense. Prosecutors were reviewing the 9 September shooting that wounded 34-year-old Jacoby Johnson.