Joe Gerardo was taken into custody in Globe on Nov. 3 and booked into jail on a first-degree murder charge, according to the Phoenix Police Department. Court records show he declined to be interviewed after his arrest.

The victim, 59-year-old Jeffrey Bellemare, was fatally shot around 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 29, 2013, while working at a complex near 51st Avenue and Indian School Road in west Phoenix.

At the time, witnesses told investigators they saw a man and a woman run from the area where Bellemare was shot and flee in an older-model sedan with front-end damage. Authorities recovered two .40-caliber shell casings and a black cellphone backing bearing the words "real gangsta," according to a probable cause statement.

The investigation stalled for years. In 2015, a woman contacted police and said her teenage daughter had seen the shooter the night Bellemare was killed but was afraid to speak with officers. Authorities followed up but could not identify a suspect.

Earlier this year, a second woman — also a teenager at the time of the shooting — came forward. She told investigators she saw the suspects walking through the parking lot and that the man was armed and said he was going to "handle" Bellemare that night. She later picked Gerardo out of a photo lineup.

A man who was in an apartment with the new witness on the night of the killing was also interviewed. He told police that a man known as "Tweety" had come to the apartment with a woman. Another person who lived at the complex in 2013 told investigators they had heard people say Tweety was responsible for Bellemare's death and identified Gerardo as Tweety.

Police said their investigation found that Gerardo knew someone living at the complex at the time, was known to carry a .40-caliber handgun, owned a 1993 Chrysler Imperial sedan with front-end damage, and was a documented gang member who went by the nickname Tweety.

The arrest marks a rare resolution in a long-dormant homicide case, one that hinged on witnesses who were children when the shooting happened and who, years later, chose to talk. For residents of the neighborhood around 51st Avenue and Indian School Road, the killing of a guard who was unarmed and working an overnight shift has long stood as an open wound.

Gerardo's case will now move through the Maricopa County court system, where prosecutors will have to build a case largely on witness accounts and circumstantial evidence gathered more than a decade after the fact. No trial date has been set.