The city of Reading, Pennsylvania had seen sorrow before, but nothing that prepared it for what would unfold in the second week of September 2025.
It was a tragedy that would ripple through neighborhoods, through church pews, through playgrounds and school hallways, leaving behind a silence so heavy it pressed on the heart of anyone who spoke their names.
Geraldina Peguero-Mancebo.
Her husband, Junior Cabrera-Colon.
And their baby boy, little Jeyden.
Three lives intertwined by love, undone by obsession, and stolen by a man whose heart had learned to hunger for something it could not possess.
To understand the weight of what happened, one has to imagine the family as they truly were before darkness crept in.
Geraldina, just thirty-one, carried a softness that made people trust her immediately — a warm laugh, a calm voice, the gentle way she tucked her hair behind her ear when thinking.
She worked hard, loved harder, and like many young mothers, she lived for the moments her son reached for her with sleepy morning hands or giggled into her shoulder.
Junior, her husband, was the steadiness of the family — a quiet, proud man who worked long hours and kept his heart anchored firmly to his home.
He was the type who fixed neighbors’ fences without being asked, who learned to braid his wife’s hair on nights she came home exhausted, who danced with his son in the kitchen while dinner simmered on the stove.
To the people who knew him, he was gentle strength.
And then there was baby Jeyden — just one year old.
Bright-eyed, curious, the kind of baby who stretched his hands toward everything, as though the world was something he could gather to his chest.
His parents called him “our little sunrise,” because even on the hardest days, he brought light that felt new and full of promise.
For a long time, their life was simple.
Humble.
Beautiful in the small ways that matter most.
They worked, they dreamed, they planned for a future that felt possible.
But standing just outside the frame of their family portrait was another man — sixty-one-year-old Jose Rodriguez.
A man whose life intersected with Geraldina’s at a time she needed stability.
A man who offered financial help, who signed his name on her lease, who convinced himself that money, favors, and closeness could carve a path into her heart.
To Rodriguez, what he felt was love.
To everyone else, it was possession — a dangerous twisting of desire into something that expected obedience, not affection.
He wanted her.
He demanded her.
And the moment she made clear she would not leave her husband, something inside him fractured into violence.
On the evening of September 12, 2025, the air in Reading carried the faint smell of early autumn — a mix of cooling concrete and leaves that had just begun to brown at their edges.
Around 8:30 p.m., Geraldina walked with little Jeyden along North 5th Street, unaware that the crossroads of her life was waiting only a few steps away.
Rodriguez pulled up in his vehicle, offering a ride, speaking with familiarity she had grown used to.
Maybe she thought he only wanted to talk.
Maybe she believed, as she had many times before, that she could calm whatever storm was brewing behind his eyes.
She buckled her baby into the car.
She closed the door.
She stepped into the passenger seat.
And in that moment, fate closed around her like a tightening fist.
Investigators later pieced together what she could never have imagined — Rodriguez had already decided that she would not leave that car alive.
Her refusal to choose him had become, in his mind, an unforgivable betrayal.
As they drove toward East Huller Lane in Ontelaunee Township, the world passing by their windows remained unaware of the tragedy forming inside that vehicle.
It was a dark, quiet stretch of road — the kind where headlights are the only witness.
Rodriguez pulled over.
A soundless moment passed, the kind that holds the weight of an entire future breaking.
And then he shot her in the back of the head.
Geraldina died instantly.
One moment a mother with a future full of plans, and the next — silence.
What happened after is the part of the story that people cannot speak without their voices breaking.
Rodriguez drove with the body of the woman he claimed to love, her baby still breathing in the back seat.
Little Jeyden — one year old, strapped into his car seat, waiting for his mother to turn around and smile at him.
But instead of saving him, instead of sparing the smallest and most innocent soul involved, Rodriguez carried him to a lake.
Investigators later found the baby’s body partially submerged in thick mud and water, ten to fifteen feet from the shoreline.
He had been thrown.
Discarded.
Left alone in the darkness and cold, the world far too cruel for a child who had only just learned to walk.
He was pronounced dead at 12:10 p.m. the next day.
The coroner said his small body still held traces of the warmth children always seem to carry, as though innocence tries to cling even as life slips away.
But the killing did not end there.
On September 13, as panic grew because mother and child had not returned home, Junior searched for answers, unaware of the danger waiting for him.
When he crossed paths with Rodriguez on Pear Street, anger erupted into confrontation.
Junior was a husband grieving without yet knowing what he had lost.
Rodriguez was a man trying to erase every witness to the consequences of his obsession.
The fight was brief.
Desperate.
One gunshot ended it.
Junior was found hours later in a wooded area near Baer Park, his life stolen just like his wife’s and child’s.
Reading police officers, already searching for the missing mother and her baby, did not yet know the full horror of what had been set in motion.
Footage eventually revealed Rodriguez’s car near where Junior’s body was found.
Witnesses placed him near the disappearance.
And when investigators finally confronted him on September 18, he confessed — first claiming self-defense, later revealing the truth.
He admitted he killed them because Geraldina refused to leave her husband.
He admitted anger because she had “taken his money.”
He showed detectives where he had thrown her purse, her phone, the gun he used.
There was no remorse, only explanation — as though reason could ever justify the destruction of a family.
On September 29, authorities announced the final charges: three counts of murder, abuse of a corpse, and multiple related offenses.
He remained in custody, alone now, surrounded by walls that echoed none of the love he had tried to steal.
District Attorney John Adams spoke with a shaking voice.
“I don’t think any of us can imagine the tragedy that took place here,” he said.
“It’s horrific.”
He was right.
The heart struggles to hold the scope of it — the loss of a mother, a father, a baby.
Three lights extinguished in less than forty-eight hours.
The community of Reading mourned in ways that felt disjointed and raw.
Vigils were held.
Parents held their children tighter.
Neighbors left flowers on porches.
Strangers wept reading the news, imagining the final moments of a family whose story should have been ordinary, filled with birthdays and holidays and school photos pinned to refrigerators.
Instead, they became a symbol — of broken obsession, of unchecked rage, of how quickly love can be twisted by a mind unwilling to accept boundaries.
And yet, even through grief, people remembered the family not for their deaths but for their lives.
They remembered the way Geraldina adored her son.
The way Junior worked tirelessly for his family.
The way baby Jeyden laughed with his whole body.
Those memories rose above the brutality, refusing to be overshadowed.
In the end, tragedy had taken them, but not erased them.
Their names remained spoken in Reading, in churches, in courtrooms, in the whispers of neighbors who still paused when passing their old apartment building.
The family was gone — but their love, the love they shared with one another, remained the part of the story that outlived the darkness.
Because evil may end lives.
But it cannot erase the beauty they held while living.
And for Reading, Pennsylvania, that truth became the only light left in the shadow of a crime too terrible to forget.
