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.