Springfield is a suburban community in Fairfax County, Virginia, approximately fifteen miles southwest of Washington, D.C. With its residential neighborhoods, shopping centers, and heavily traveled roads, it is a familiar part of Northern Virginia’s sprawling suburban landscape.
On Saturday, May 24th, 2014, the Memorial Day holiday weekend was underway. That evening, twenty-four-year-old Junior Abel Flores was in the area of Backlick Road, a major thoroughfare running through Springfield.
According to information subsequently released by the Fairfax County Police Department’s Cold Case Squad, Junior was at a bus stop along Backlick Road when an unidentified assailant attacked him with a knife.
Precisely when the confrontation began, what preceded it, and whether Junior knew his attacker have not been publicly established.
At a little past ten p.m., Fairfax County police officers received a call reporting a man lying in the roadway near the intersection of Backlick Road and Highland Street. The initial report suggested that the man might have been struck by a vehicle. When officers reached the scene, however, they discovered an injury to his upper body that was inconsistent with a motor vehicle collision.
The injured man was transported to a nearby hospital, where he subsequently died. What had initially been reported as a possible traffic accident was now a homicide investigation.
The Fairfax County Police Department’s May 25th announcement provided few additional details. Detectives were investigating the death, but the victim’s identity was temporarily withheld while authorities attempted to notify his next of kin. Those relatives, police explained, were located outside the United States.
It would be another two days before the department publicly identified the man who had been killed. On May 27th, 2014, Fairfax County police announced that the deceased man was Junior Abel Flores, a resident of the Springfield area. In the department’s later cold case records, Junior is also identified by the nickname “Gitano.”
There is relatively little publicly available information about Junior’s personal life. Contemporary news reports did not provide details about his employment, education, relationships, or how long he had lived in Northern Virginia. The fact that police initially withheld his name because his next of kin were outside the country suggests that at least some of his immediate family members lived abroad. However, authorities did not publicly specify their location or describe Junior’s nationality or immigration history.
The information released by police also does not indicate how Junior came to be lying in the roadway after being stabbed. It is possible that he moved from the bus stop after the assault, but that remains speculation. There is no publicly available account describing his movements between the attack and the arrival of officers. Likewise, the identity of the person who first discovered Junior and contacted emergency services has not been publicly disclosed.
The case gradually disappeared from the news, leaving behind a brief collection of newspaper reports and police announcements. But although Junior Flores’s murder received limited attention at the time, it was not forgotten by Fairfax County investigators.
In 2020, the Fairfax County Police Department’s Cold Case Squad began receiving renewed public attention for its efforts to highlight unresolved homicides through a dedicated webpage. The department published summaries of cases spanning several decades, including murders that had occurred in the Springfield and Burke communities. Junior Flores’s name appeared among them.
As of October 2026, however, Junior Flores’s murder remains listed among Fairfax County’s unsolved homicides, with no publicly verified arrest or resolution located in the available records.
