She was found still wearing the shimmering silver cocktail number she wore to celebrate her wedding. She was as bright as the sequins on that dress. Young. Beautiful.
But within two days of saying, "I do," she was dead.
Police officers in the suburban Chicago town of Burbank found Estrella Carrera, 26, in the bathtub of the condominium she planned to share with Arnoldo Jimenez, 30. She had been stabbed multiple times.
"This was a brutal murder," Capt. Joe Ford, spokesman for the Burbank Police Department, said Wednesday. "There is some aggression, obviously."
Police found no signs of a forced entry into the condo on Rutherford Avenue. They were searching Wednesday for Carrera's husband.
Jimenez is the prime suspect in his young wife's murder and is wanted on a first-degree murder warrant, police said.
"It is important to know that this appears to be an isolated incident stemming from a domestic situation and the investigation is continuing," police said Monday, before obtaining the warrant.
Jimenez had known Carrera for three years and married her Friday, at Chicago's City Hall, police said. The couple had dinner with family and friends and then climbed into a party limousine to celebrate at a night club on the north side of town.
"She was happy. She was fine," Carrera's cousin Sandy Lopez told CNN affiliate WBBM.
Carrera was more like a sister to Lopez than a cousin, Lopez said. At 26, she had her whole life ahead of her.
"Why? Why would you take her from us?" Lopez said, struggling to comprehend how anyone could commit such a heinous act.
The last time anyone saw the newlyweds was at 4 in the morning Saturday when they got out of the limo and headed back home to their condominium in a nondescript three-story brick building.
About 36 hours later, police found her body after responding to a call from a family member concerned that there might be something wrong. Carrera had failed to pick up her two children, ages 2 and 8, as scheduled the day before.
Family members tried to contact her and Jimenez on their cell phones.
No one answered.
Jimenez was last seen driving his black 2006 Maserati sedan, a car that Ford estimated was worth between $50,000 and $60,000.
"It's a pretty expensive car, without a doubt," Ford said.
Such a car raises eyebrows in Burbank, a blue-collar community that is ethnically mixed.
Police said thought and prayers go out to Carrera's family, especially her motherless children. Meanwhile, Ford said, police will keep "peeling the layers of the Jimenez onion."
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