Nigerian immigrant, Ayoola Ajayi, has been arrested the United States for allegedly killing University of Utah student, MacKenzie Lueck.
Salt Lake City Police Chief, Mike Brown, confirmed Mr Ajayi as the person of interest named earlier this week in connection with the disappearance of the young woman the media has dubbed “sugar baby”.
Ajayi, 31, is facing charges of murder, kidnapping and obstruction of justice.
“After an exhaustive week of investigation we are filing charges of aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping, obstruction of justice and desecration of a body in the homicide of MacKenzie Lueck,” Mr Brown said.
Ajayi was arrested Friday morning after SWAT personnel responded to an apartment complex in Salt Lake City. Police said he was on his way to be booked into jail as of about noon Friday.
Brown said their investigation confirmed that all phone and social media activity from Lueck’s accounts ceased around 3 a.m. on June 17, shortly after she was last seen at Hatch Park. She had taken a Lyft to the park and the driver told police she willingly got into a vehicle and left the park with someone.
The 23-year-old’s last communications were with Ajayi, Brown said, and both parties’ cell phones were at Hatch Park within less than of a minute of each other. That overlap occurred shortly before Lueck’s online/cellular activity ceased.
Brown said they began investigating Ajayi. When they served a warrant on his home, neighbours reported seeing the man burning something in his backyard, using gasoline as an accelerant, on June 17 and 18.
Born in Nigeria, Ajayi appears to have briefly explored a career in modelling, according to a profile on ModelMangement.com.
Listing his height as six-foot-one, Ajayi goes on to describe himself as “tall, buffed, funny,” as well as “a victim, Romantic, Violent and character actor [sic].”
The former information technology specialist for the US Army also recently worked for Dell and Goldman Sachs.
His neighbour, Tom Camomile, told CNN prior to his arrest that Ajayi was a “smart guy” and a “computer geek.”
“It’s a little unnerving and unsettling” that Ajayi was connected to the case, Camomile said at that time.
“I think he’s a man of high integrity,” he said, “but you don’t know anyone.”
Just last year, Ajayi self-published a book titled Forge Identity, which details the story of a young boy witnessing two brutal murders, in which neighbour and a friend were both “burned alive in front of him”.
