"He heard this male subject going by that moniker in the bar. So he started looking - and was bright enough to look on his cell phone - and brought up the media coverage from Denver," Palm Springs, Calif. Police Department spokesperson Rhonda Long said on Tuesday. "He looked at the picture [on his phone], and said this was the guy."
Not long after, Palm Springs Police officers showed up at a bar named Score and took Daryl Rassmussen into custody.
Denver Police investigators will not call Rassmussen a suspect in the murders of Ronald Ford and Ramiro "Rome" Sanchez, but they are, for the time being, continuing to label him as a "person of interest."
"That means that individual has some information that can potentially help us in our investigation," Det. John White, spokesperson for the Denver Police Department, said.
Denver Police found Ford's body in the basement of the home he had been renting with Sanchez, his partner of a number of years, on Feb. 11. Sanchez's body was found in the same home near 1st and Stuart Street a week later. Both, according to an autopsy, had died of "blunt force trauma."
Denver Police said early on that both Ford and Sanchez had agreed to take Rassmussen in. Investigators say he was homeless at the time and in need of a place to stay. Yet, they add, when the bodies turned up Rassmussen was nowhere to be found.
Initially, when they couldn't locate Sanchez, they labeled both Sanchez and Rassmussen as "persons of interest," but things changed when a Denver homicide detective asked some of his investigators to go back to the house to look for new evidence. That's when they found Sanchez's body.
Rassmussen was taken into custody not on the Denver case but rather on a pair of outstanding warrants in two other states.
Denver Police will continue looking into this and charges could very well be forthcoming. As of now, because Rassmussen has not been charged in the Denver case, extradition is not an issue.
(KUSA-TV © 2011 Multimedia Holdings Corporation)