Year after Utah mother of five gunned down in driveway, pair out on parole charged

Local prosecutors in Utah brought charges against two people Wednesday who were out on parole nearly 16 months ago when they allegedly shot and killed a mother of five in a driveway at a suburban Salt Lake City home in what authorities now believe to be a carjacking gone wrong.

"We are absolutely relieved," Jessica Nemelka, one of the victim’s five children, told Desert News on Wednesday. "Now that we know it's more like a random carjacking, it's not more comforting — nothing could make this comforting — but it was absolutely the wrong place, wrong time for her. And that's unfortunate, but it's better than being someone that she knew who targeted her for a personal reason." Soon after Nemelka was found bleeding out from a single gunshot wound in the driver’s seat of her vehicle in a friend’s Millcreek driveway, courts closed at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. She had finished dinner at a friend’s house and was trying to leave around 10 p.m. No suspects were publicly identified for months, and her family was left wondering if the case would ever be solved.