Stabbing suspect lived in small town for years

MABTON, Wash. – Manuel Vazquez lived in Mabton for at least five years, fathered a child and was a valued employee at the nearby hop yard.

The only problem is that he wasn’t really Manuel Vazquez.

His real name is Refugio Jose Vazquez-Tellez, 38, wanted by law enforcement for eight years in Lewis County for a 2004 stabbing.

“It has the whole town shaken up,” said Sgt. Cas Cedillo of the Mabton Police Department. “You don’t know who lives among you anymore.”

Mabton officers arrested Vazquez-Tellez on Sept. 4 after an anonymous tipster told police he overheard the suspect “bragging” about the Lewis County stabbing he thought he got away with, Cedillo said. The tipster, who spent time in jail himself, recognized the suspect from a 2-year-old episode of the “Washington’s Most Wanted” TV show, Cedillo said.

Within hours, Mabton police visited his job site, questioned him and confirmed his real identity through distinctive tattoos mentioned in an arrest warrant for first-degree assault charges from Lewis County Superior Court.

Vazquez-Tellez, who has other aliases according to court records and went by the nickname Marlboro, was arraigned Thursday in Lewis County and is being held on $75,000 bail with a trial date of Oct. 29. The maximum penalty is life in prison.

Centralia police accuse Vazquez-Tellez of breaking a Corona beer bottle over the head of another man and then stabbing and slashing the man several times during a fight at an apartment complex on June 26, 2004, according to a probable cause affidavit. During their investigation, Centralia police learned Vazquez-Tellez called in sick with a cut hand to the local recycling center at which he worked but the officers never found him.

In May this year, investigators suspected he may have moved to California, so they modified the search warrant to include the entire United States, said Will Halstead, Lewis County deputy prosecutor.

Turns out, he was in Mabton, a town of 2,000, for most of those years and doing quite well, Cedillo said.

He had a fake Social Security card, driver’s license with a different birth date and a home in the 400 block of Cedar Street.

“We drive down that street for patrol every single day,” Cedillo said.

Vazquez-Tellez’s ex-girlfriend, with whom he has a 3-year-old daughter, had no idea either.

“Never did it ever cross my mind that he had that past like that,” said Maria Isabel Sanchez, 32.

The two met at a bar where Sanchez worked as a waitress in 2008, Sanchez said. He went by the nickname Kuco around her. They had a baby girl the next year, and he moved into her house with her parents.

Each of them had an older child from previous relationships. His other child lives in the Tacoma area, Sanchez said.

Other than that, she knew little about Vazquez-Tellez’s background.

They split up in 2010, she said, but he kept in close contact with their daughter, vowing to work hard to support her. And he did, Sanchez said. Bosses routinely called him one of the fastest, most productive workers when she brought him lunch to the fields or warehouses.

Sanchez said she plans to take their daughter to visit Vazquez-Tellez in jail but he may be deported to Mexico, she said.

He lived in Mabton without legal documentation, she said.

“I didn’t know anything about his past,” she said. “He never talked about it. He never brought it up.”