Nearly six months after the shooting of King of the Hill star Jonathan Joss, a Texas grand jury has indicted Sigfredo Ceja Alvarez, 57, on one count of first-degree murder. Joss was 59 at the time of his death.
According to the San Antonio Police Department, on Sunday, June 1, 2025, a suspect drove up to Joss’ former home where Joss and his husband, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, were checking the mail and shot the actor three times before driving away. Officers pronounced Joss dead on the scene and apprehended Alvarez one block away from the shooting. In the official police report filed after the incident, arresting officers claim that Alvarez told them, “I shot him.” Soon after, law enforcement released Alvarez on bond and put him on house arrest.
In the wake of Joss’ killing, the late actor’s husband asserted that the violent incident followed years of threats and homophobic harassment from the couple’s neighbors in San Antonio. Gonzales maintains that his husband’s killing was a hate crime, claiming that the killer was “yelling violent homophobic slurs at us” before they opened fire.
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SAPD did not originally investigate the murder of Joss as a hate crime, but, following public outcry, Police Chief William McManus walked back his department’s earlier decision. “We gather the facts, and we give those facts to the district attorney’s office,” McManus explained, “And then that hate crime designation is determined at sentencing.”
Critically, Texas law does not have a separate charge for hate crimes, so the first-degree murder indictment neither confirms nor negates any possible hate crime designation for Alvarez. Gonzales, however, has expressed his certainty that the motivation behind his husband’s killing was based in bigotry.
“He was murdered by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other,” Gonzalez declared in a Facebook post following the death of Joss.
When many of Joss’ neighbors told the press that the shooting followed years of erratic and confrontational behavior on Joss’ part – one anonymous San Antonio resident callously claimed, “We all knew it was going to end up like this because of his antics” – Gonzalez pushed back, saying that none of his husband’s alleged conduct justified a lethal response.
Specifically, Gonzales spoke to The Independent about the claim that Joss was walking around their neighborhood holding a pitchfork before the shooting. “I don’t care if me and my husband were walking around with one pitchfork in our hand and another pitchfork up our ass, we didn’t point any weapons at anybody,” Gonzales told The Independent. “When the man rolled up with the gun, we were checking the mail.”
Now, Gonzales and the state of Texas will seek justice for Joss’ death. Gonzales has not publicly commented on the indictment.
