Murders Of Romeoville Family Driven By Catfish Plot

Zoraida Bartolomei’s brother had a bad feeling as he headed to her house in Romeoville, a village southwest of Chicago, he later told police. His 32-year-old sister hadn’t returned their mother’s calls all day, and her husband, 38-year-old Alberto Rolon, hadn’t shown up to work.

But when the brother arrived at the 1950s ranch house on the evening of Sept. 17, 2023, the normally quiet street was already busy with police. Their mother had also called emergency dispatchers, and officers who arrived to check on the home quickly realized something was wrong. Almost all the lights were off, and through the front picture window, they could see a TV and coffee table had been knocked over. Around the back of the house, they caught their first glimpse of what would be a gruesome scene: the family’s dogs were dead, lying in pools of blood.

Inside, Rolon was found dead in a hallway. A bedroom door had been kicked down, and within, Bartolomei was discovered dead, her hands covering her face. The couple’s sons, 10-year-old Adriel and 7-year-old Diego, had been killed in the bed, shell casings scattered around them.

As crime scene investigators began to arrive and other officers questioned neighbors, Bartolomei’s brother told police he had no idea who would want to hurt his sister and her family. They’d moved into the neighborhood earlier that year, and they weren’t struggling financially. No one in the house owned a gun.

It was clear to police the family had been targeted, and after talking to more people who knew Bartolomei, they had a person of interest: 32-year-old Nathaniel Huey Jr., a co-worker with whom she had been having an affair. But from there, the case would take shocking turns, according to hundreds of pages of police documents released earlier this month. Ultimately six people would end up dead: the family of four, as well as Huey and his fiancé, 50-year-old Ermalinda Palomo.

And it was Palomo who set the violence in motion, police said. She’d allegedly manipulated Huey for years with an elaborate catfishing scheme of faked messages and accounts that made him believe he was associated with a Mexican and Bulgarian criminal organization. As she feared his relationship with Bartolomei would tear theirs apart, police said, she used one of her fake personas to convince Huey that Bartolomei was a mole who was targeting him. She needed to be taken out.

Bartolomei had had affairs before, and her husband found out, his brother told police. But to Rolon, the most important thing was to stay together for their kids, the brother said.

When Bartolomei talked about her new boyfriend to her sister, though, she called Huey her soulmate and said they were like Romeo and Juliet, according to text messages shared with police.

Bartolomei began her relationship with Huey in May 2023, when they were both working at Avanti Engineering, a machined parts manufacturer.

“You mean so much to me like I don’t think you understand how much I actually love you,” read a Post-it note found in Huey’s workstation that police said appeared to be in Bartolomei’s handwriting.

But by June 2023, Bartolomei was receiving threatening messages. They warned her away from Huey and claimed he was about to be at the center of a murder investigation. The messages accused Bartolomei of putting her children in danger by seeing him.

“You don’t know anything about me as [a] mother or person,” Bartolomei responded.

More messages were sent to Rolon in July 2023, urging him to confront Bartolomei, disparaging her and alleging that Huey had a violent past that would put their children at risk. Rolon told the anonymous messenger he wanted to be left alone.

“All I wanna do is work and go home and be with my kids,” he wrote. “I’m not a complicated person and don’t need or deserve all this drama.”

On Sunday, Sept. 17, 2023, a gunman entered Bartolomei and Rolon’s home through the backdoor around 3:40 a.m., according to police.

Rolon, who worked nights during the week, was awake and went to check on the noise coming from the backdoor. He was shot and injured, then ran toward the bedrooms, police said. The intruder shot him five more times, killing him before he made it to his family.

The children had been having trouble sleeping and were in one of the bedrooms with Bartolomei. As the gunman moved to kick down the door, she stood behind it, holding it closed and screaming for help, police said. Eventually, he breached the bedroom after shooting her through the door, leaving her injured.

One boy was wearing a sleep mask covering his eyes, and the other clutched a stuffed animal, police said. The intruder fired two gunshots into each child’s head, killing them, before fatally shooting their mother.

The family’s three dogs, frightened by the gunshots, tried to get out of the house, clawing at the front door. The gunman shot each of them in the head, killing them.

Police said the shooter attempted to make the killings appear to be a senseless crime by knocking over furniture and spray-painting profanity in the living room. He only got as far as “F” before the paint can gave him trouble and he abandoned it, police said. The gunman left about 40 minutes after breaking in.

The next day, as news of the violence began to spread among Bartolomei’s co-workers, police arrived at Avanti Engineering to begin interviewing them. Officers learned that on Sept. 14, Huey had left work early and hadn’t returned until that morning, the day after the shooting. Co-workers told officers there’d been some tension between Bartolomei and him before he took off, and he seemed upset.

A gun enthusiast who once owned a security company, Huey lived with Ermalinda Palomo, a woman he called his wife (he said they had a church ceremony but never filed a marriage license), and her adult daughters.

One of the daughters told officers she didn’t know Huey well, but described him as paranoid, often saying people were coming for him and that he was being followed. He was the type of person who placed black electrical tape over his mobile doorbell camera and even the red light on the television in their home. She said if anyone removed the tape, Huey became angry.

On Sept. 18, detectives talked to Huey at work. He denied ever having been to Bartolomei’s home and said he had nothing to do with the shootings.

But officers continued to watch him, at one point spotting him transferring guns into another man’s car. As police followed him after work, he pulled over into a Walmart parking lot to talk to them again. They asked him about the threatening messages they’d discovered had been sent to Bartolomei and Rolon. Huey told them he didn’t know about those, but he admitted he’d received “random ass messages” of his own that people were coming after him.

“Huey then told us that they are Bulgarian and that they always do stuff to his phone. Huey would not tell us what they would do, but told us ‘they’ have ‘high-tech capabilities,’” police said.

Huey added they’d sent him numerous threats, including that he’d be dead within a year.

The messages weren’t coming from Bulgarians.

When digital forensic specialists later combed through the phones of people involved in the case, they discovered the real source of Huey’s paranoia: Palomo, his fiancé. Since December 2021, she’d created fake phone numbers and multiple online personas to convince her fiancé that he was a part of a Mexican and Bulgarian criminal organization, police said.

“She would speak about other characters to build up their background stories and relationships among each other and within the fictional organization,” police said. “Some of the roles she established for various characters include: organization bosses and shot-callers, hitmen, and hackers.”

A forensic search of Palomo’s digital data revealed she researched information about the dark web to prove to Huey she was a hacker, translated words to pretend to speak Bulgarian, and logged into an app to secretly track his location, according to police. She would occasionally intercept Huey’s text messages with other women, which in turn made her jealous, police said.

Huey had a history of cheating on Palomo, and she knew he was seeing another woman. Police said Palomo used her fake personas within the fictitious criminal organization to encourage her boyfriend to be faithful in his relationship and stop speaking with other women. However, conversations between Palomo’s fake personas and Huey turned dark when she convinced him that he was under constant surveillance by the fictitious criminal organization. The fake personas told a paranoid Huey that there was a “mole” within his life who was planning to attack him, according to police. Based on his responses to the text messages, police said Huey fully believed the information being fed to him.

According to police, Palomo also sent threatening text messages to Bartolomei and Rolon. On Sept. 14, 2023, after her threats failed to get Bartolomei to break things off, Palomo sent Huey a text message through one of her personas convincing him that Bartolomei was the mole planning to attack him, according to police.

He quickly took action. After leaving work early that day, Huey and a persona of Palomo’s began plotting to kill Bartolomei by researching her neighborhood, looking up cameras, and planning how to get in and out of the house and how to avoid leaving behind DNA, according to police. His wife would drive him there, he told the persona, not realizing he was actually messaging Palomo, police said.

Police said Palomo’s persona instructed Huey to make the scene appear to be a burglary committed by kids. She allegedly reassured him: “Many murders go unsolved.”

But with police already following him the day after the murders, Huey was panicking. One officer noted in a report that he appeared visibly shaken, and the officer overheard him saying on a phone call that he and Palomo would need a lawyer.

On Sept. 19, 2023, the couple met with an attorney. Then Huey met his mother at a Target while Palomo waited in the car outside. Huey confessed to killing Bartolomei and her family, his mother told police. When asked why, he said because “people were after him” and “he believed the kids were better off dead than alive without parents,” according to police.

Later that day, an officer stopped Palomo outside their home as she was about to get into her black Chevy Malibu. A license plate reader had captured her car in Romeoville at 3:48 a.m. on the day of the murders, and police were in the process of getting a search warrant, the officer told her. She left on foot instead.

When she didn’t return, her family reported her missing on Sept. 20, fearing she had been kidnapped by Huey and that she was in danger. Huey had also left home, and though there wasn’t enough evidence yet to make an arrest, authorities tracked his GMC SUV using first his phone, then license plate readers.

A license plate reader in Catoosa, Oklahoma — more than 600 miles from his home — captured the GMC later on Sept. 20 and alerted local police that a murder suspect and, potentially, a kidnapping victim were inside.

Huey and Palomo had stopped at a Walmart, where according to a police review of surveillance video, “Neither appeared to be held against their will. Both appeared relatively relaxed.”

But as they got back into the GMC, a Catoosa police officer switched on her car’s lights to attempt to stop them and investigate the missing person report. Instead, Huey drove off, crashing into another car and then a solid center median. As the driver side door was pinned shut, the GMC caught fire.

Huey then shot Palomo in the back of her head before killing himself, police said. She was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

The attorney who previously represented Huey and Palomo declined to comment to HuffPost. After roughly a year of reviewing the evidence, Romeoville police — with the agreement of local prosecutors and officials — determined that they were the only people responsible for the murders.

With the suspects dead and the police investigation complete, the case is now closed. But Romeoville Chief of Police Brant Hromadka said in a statement earlier this month that the deaths of Bartolomei, Rolon and their children will forever impact their loved ones, as well as the many officers and investigators who worked to uncover what happened to them.

“Nothing can prepare a person for such an incident, and nothing can justify such a senseless act of violence,” Hromadka said. “Although finalized, the finality of this case unfortunately does not mean closure for so many continuing to grieve.”

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