WASHINGTON — Fernando Asturizaga, the man police identified as the person of interest in the 2000 disappearance and killing of Alison Thresher, was found dead in his prison cell later that evening, police said.
Asturizaga had been serving a more than 100-year sentence for raping and sexually abusing Thresher’s daughter around the time the 45-year-old Bethesda woman, who worked as a Washington Post copy editor, went missing.
A correctional officer at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, found Asturizaga unresponsive in his jail cell at about 8:45 p.m. — several hours after Montgomgery County police held a public news conference in which the 51-year-old man was named a person of interest in Thresher’s death.
The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said it is investigating Asturizaga’s death along with Maryland State Police.
Officials did not release details about what led to his death. Gerard Shields, a spokesman for the corrections department, said all indications point to suicide but that the state medical examiner’s office will make the final determination.
On Thursday, police said they had reopened the cold case into Thresher’s disappearance thanks to newly analyzed forensic evidence, which indicated Thresher had been killed in her apartment and that Asturizaga may have tried to destroy blood evidence inside.
However, Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manger said investigators did not have enough evidence to charge Asturizaga with a crime in part because Thresher’s body was never found.
Manger said Asturizaga had refused to discuss Thresher’s disappearance with investigators.
Asturizaga, a former teacher and sometimes baby sitter to the Asturizaga children, was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing Hannah Thresher for three years starting in 1999, when she was 10 years old. Asturizaga worked at the Friendship Community School as a Spanish teacher, after-school coordinator and summer camp counselor.
Police said Alison Thresher had suspicions about an inappropriate relationship between the teacher and her daughter and confronted Asturizaga about them in the months before she went missing in May 2000.
Thresher was last seen when she had dinner with her parents in Georgetown on May 23, 2000. She never showed up for work the next day and later a neighbor reported hearing cries coming from her Sangamore Road apartment at about 4 or 5 a.m. the day she went missing, police said.
A resident of the Brookmont neighborhood also later reported to police seeing a “suspicious male” running through the area about 6 a.m. that morning, near where Thresher’s abandoned 1997 Volvo would later be found. Police said the physical description of that man matched Asturizaga.
Hannah Thresher and her brother, Sam, both spoke at the police news conference Thursday in which Asturizaga was named a person of interest in their mother’s death.
“For my mother, I need the whole truth to come out,” Hannah Thresher said. “Despite the trial that ensued when I came forward about (Asturizaga’s) abuse, and the resulting 100-some years that he was sentenced to spend in prison, there are still questions to be answered.”
WTOP’s Megan Cloherty contributed to this report.
