San Diego Double Murder Now Triple As Gianni Belvedere ID’ed As Body In Trunk

The San Diego double murder mystery that began on Christmas Eve is now a triple murder mystery. A body found Friday in the trunk of car parked near a Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant in Riverside, California, about 90 miles north of where the San Diego murders took place, has been positively identified as Gianni Belvedere, San Diego’s Channel 10 News is reporting.

A former Provo, Utah resident who recently moved to San Diego where he started an Italian food business, the 24-year-old Gianni Belvedere was the fiancé of earlier murder victim 22-year-old Ilona Flint and brother of Salvatore Belvedere, also 22 an the second Christmas Eve victim.

As The Inquisitr, which has been following the tragic story from the beginning, reported, both Flint and Salvatore were shot dead in the early morning hours of December 24 as they sat in a car outside a Macy’s department store.

Gianni Belvedere was last seen around 10 pm the previous evening. He was missing ever since. Though the cause of his death has not been released, Riverside police said that Gianni Belvedere was the victim of a homicide. His body was identified through a fingerprint match.

The Belvedere brothers’ father runs an Italian restaurant in Lakeside, a suburb about 20 miles outside of San Diego. Four detectives were spotted at the establishment Thursday, but San Diego police did not say what they were doing there, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Gianni Belvedere and Ilona Flint were high school sweethearts who friends say were inseparable and their respective families each considered the other one of their own. Though there were early rumors that Flint and the younger Belvedere brother were somehow romantically involved and that their killings were the result of a love triangle, friends dismissed that possibility.

“There was a lot of idiotic speculation that Gianni had something to do with the shooting or that he had possibly harmed himself, that he might have fled, that he was in a jealous rage and did this,” Andre Briones, a close friend of the couple told CNN. “Anyone who knows the family, anyone who knows Gianni and Ilona’s relationship completely understands that there is no possible way that could have ever happened.”

Police apparently ruled out that possibility as well. Gianni Belvedere was not considered a suspect in the killings. Police treated him as a “missing person at risk” until his body was found in the trunk of his own car in Riverside Friday.

Now the three promising young lives have been extinguished far too early and police are trying to figure out who did it and why. All they know, or at least all they are saying so far is that the motive was not robbery.

“In looking through the evidence at the scene, it does not appear that any sort of robbery took place during this incident,” San Diego Police Lt. Michael Hastings said.