She dreamed of being an astronaut. The man who killed her taught astronomy on the sidewalk.
On February 24, 1999, 13-year-old Minerliz Soriano left her middle school in the Bronx and started walking home. She never arrived. Four days later she was found in a dumpster behind a video store on Bartow Avenue in Co-op City, bound and wrapped in a garbage bag. The medical examiner determined her neck had been compressed, and that the compression killed her. Prosecutors would later tell a jury she had been sexually abused.
Detectives at the 45th Precinct had one piece of physical evidence that mattered: a semen stain recovered from the sweatshirt she was wearing. It produced a complete male DNA profile. In 2000 that profile was run against New York State's convicted offender databank and came back negative. Whoever left it had never been convicted of a qualifying crime in New York. The case went cold.
What eventually broke it was not a new witness or a confession. It was a change in what the state was allowed to ask its own database.
This video covers the 1999 disappearance and the four days of searching; the evidence recovered and why a DNA profile with no database match is a fingerprint with no name; the difference between forensic genetic genealogy, which uses consumer ancestry databases, and familial DNA searching, which never leaves the government's own convicted-offender databank and asks whether a close relative of the suspect is in it; how New York came to permit familial searching in 2017 by regulation rather than by statute, after the legislature declined to pass a law; the April 2019 joint application by the NYPD and the Bronx District Attorney's Office, one of roughly thirty approved statewide; the partial match that came back to a man already dead, and the genealogy problem that handed investigators; how the list narrowed to a neighbour who had lived in the same building as the Soriano family in 1999 and had been interviewed, and cleared, at the time; Joseph Martinez's second life as "Jupiter Joe," the sidewalk astronomer who gave free telescope lessons to children on Bronx streets and subway platforms; the undercover meeting at a New Rochelle diner that produced his DNA; the May 2022 appeals court ruling that invalidated New York's familial searching program eighteen months after it worked here, and the Legal Aid Society challenge behind it; the month-long 2025 trial; and the March 2026 sentencing, where Minerliz's father and her childhood best friend both spoke.
Case status: Joseph Martinez, 54, was convicted by a Bronx jury on Nov. 14, 2025 of two counts of second-degree murder, felony and intentional, and was sentenced on March 26, 2026 by Bronx Supreme Court Justice Audrey Stone to 25 years to life in prison.
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Sourcing & Credits
FACTUAL SOURCES - Office of the Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark, press release 28-2026, "Joseph Martinez, (AKA Jupiter Joe) Sentenced to 25 Years to Life in Prison for 1999 Murder of Minerliz Soriano," March 26, 2026. Primary source for the sentence, the conviction date and counts, the sentencing judge, the timeline of the 1999 disappearance and recovery, the April 2019 familial DNA application, and the names of the prosecuting ADAs and investigating detectives. - CBS New York, "Man convicted in murder of 13-year-old Bronx girl finally sentenced nearly 3 decades later," March 26, 2026. Source for Martinez's statement to the court, Kimberly Ortiz's remarks, and Luis Soriano's remarks. - ABC7 New York (WABC), "Man sentenced for 1999 cold case murder of 13-year-old in the Bronx," March 27, 2026. Source for ADA John Miras's remarks, the astronaut detail, and that Soriano would have turned 40 in 2026. - Norwood News, "'Jupiter Joe' Gets 25 Years to Life for 1999 Murder of Minerliz Soriano, First NYC Indictment Using Familial DNA," March 26, 2026, and "In First for NYC, Familial DNA Technology Solves 1999 Cold Murder Case of 13-Year-Old Bronx Girl," December 1, 2021. - CBS New York, "NYPD: Familial DNA Search Identified Joseph Martinez As Suspect In Cold Case Murder Of Bronx Teen Minerliz Soriano," November 30, 2021. Source for retired Detective Malcolm Reiman's account of pushing for familial DNA, and NYPD Forensic Investigative Unit CO Emanuel Katranakis's description of how the search works. - PIX11, "Man charged in 1999 murder of Bronx girl called himself 'Jupiter Joe,' offered astronomy lessons in community: DA," November 30, 2021. Source for the Pelham Parkway and Bartow Avenue locations and the 2017 New York approval date for familial searching. - NBC New York, "How Familial DNA Evidence Led to Arrest in '99 Cold Case Killing of Bronx Girl," November 30, 2021. Source for the 2000 negative database search and Luis Soriano's 2021 remarks. - Forensic Magazine (Michelle Taylor, with reporting by Michael R. Sisak of the Associated Press), "New York Court Shuts Down Familial DNA Matching," May 9, 2022. Source for the May 2022 appeals court ruling, the 2017 regulatory authorization by the Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Commission on Forensic Science, the Legal Aid Society challenge and the racial-disparity argument, the ~30 approved searches / 10 disclosures / 2 arrests figures, and the confirmation that Martinez was interviewed by police in 1999 but never considered a suspect. - The New York Times (Michael Wilson), "Who Murdered Minerliz? How a Diner Meet-up Cracked the Case," April 1, 2026. Source for the undercover collection of Martinez's DNA at a New Rochelle diner. The narration attributes this detail to Times reporting on trial testimony rather than stating it flatly. IMAGE / FOOTAGE SOURCES - Minerliz Soriano identification photograph: released during the investigation and widely republished across news coverage of this case; copy retrieved from NBC New York's own hosting. Used per this channel's standing practice on widely-circulated press-identification photographs. Used in slides 00 and 23, the short's opening slide, the Facebook teaser card and the YouTube thumbnail. - Press conference outside the Bronx Hall of Justice after the March 26, 2026 sentencing (two frames): photographs courtesy of the Office of the Bronx District Attorney, published via Norwood News. Public-record documentation of the proceeding. Slides 21 and 22. - Bronx County Hall of Justice exterior: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Slide 17. - Pelham Parkway station, the Bronx: CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustrative - the neighbourhood, not the scene. Slide 01. - Co-op City, the Bronx (aerial): CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustrative - the neighbourhood, not the scene. Slide 03. - Sidewalk astronomy, Madison, Wisconsin: CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustrative only - this is NOT Joseph Martinez and NOT his telescope, and the on-screen credit says so. Slide 15. - Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory analysts, 2018: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustrative - not the laboratory that handled this evidence. Used in the short. - All remaining slides (police work, evidence handling, case-file storage, DNA testing, database illustration, cold-case review, DNA profile, pedigree chart, lead work, handcuffs, courtroom interior, scales, gavel) are clearly-credited illustrative stock or public-domain images already sourced and vetted for earlier videos in this series, reused here. None depicts this case, and each slide's on-screen credit states that. NOTE ON WHAT WAS DELIBERATELY NOT USED - Frame grabs of the November 2021 perp walk are available from several outlets, but they originate from a television news broadcast, so they were not used - see this channel's standing rule against unlicensed news broadcast footage. This is why no image of Joseph Martinez appears anywhere in the short, the long-form, the teaser card or the thumbnail. - No crime-scene imagery of any kind was sought or used, and the narration does not describe the assault or the injuries beyond the medical examiner's stated cause of death, which the Bronx DA's own release states. AFFILIATE LINKS - Tag used: truecrimecases-20, read from .env (AMAZON_ASSOC_TAG) on 2026-09-20. - One link, used in the description and in both auto-posted first comments: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=familial+DNA+cold+case+investigation+true+crime&tag=truecrimecases-20 - This is a tagged SEARCH url, not a verified-ASIN product link. Two candidate ASINs were considered and rejected: 1514348365 (Parker/Vronsky, "Forensic Analysis and DNA in Criminal Investigations") and 1524746274 (Humes, "The Forever Witness"). Neither could be confirmed by scripts/verify_book.py on 2026-09-20 - the checker returned no rating data at all for either ASIN, which on a title like The Forever Witness is clearly a fetch failure rather than a genuinely unrated book. Per the standing rule, an ASIN that has not actually PASSED verification does not get linked, so this falls to the honest case-scoped search url. Separately, The Forever Witness is a forensic genetic genealogy book and this case was a state-databank familial search, so it would have been a decorative pick even if it had verified.
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