An arrest affidavit says a 39-year-old man attacked his live-in girlfriend, broke a front window and claimed he saw another man inside the home.

WACO, Texas — A 39-year-old man is accused of stabbing his live-in girlfriend several times in the chest with a paring knife during a March 3 fight at a home on Colcord Avenue, after police say he became convinced she was cheating on him.

Authorities identified the suspect as Joe Herrera and said he was arrested on an aggravated assault charge tied to family violence. The case matters beyond a single night’s violence because investigators described the attack as part of a larger pattern of control, suspicion and prior domestic abuse. Police said Herrera appeared fixated on the idea that his girlfriend was being unfaithful, and a detective wrote that he had previous domestic violence convictions before this latest arrest.

According to the arrest affidavit, officers were sent to the house after a 911 caller reported that someone had been stabbed with a knife. When they arrived, police found a large front window shattered and Herrera standing outside in the yard with blood on his shirt. Inside, the woman told officers Herrera had stabbed, or “stuck,” her in the chest multiple times with the tip of a paring knife before she managed to lock him out of the residence. Officers documented injuries that they said matched her account and photographed them at the scene. The affidavit said the violence appeared to have taken place only two to five minutes before Herrera was forced outside, making the response unusually close in time to the assault police were trying to reconstruct.

Herrera, according to investigators, gave officers a sharply different explanation for why he was outside the house and why the window was broken. Police said he claimed he was trying to get back inside because he saw his girlfriend naked with a man he did not know. He also admitted breaking the window and said that after the glass shattered he saw an unknown Black man run away from the home on foot. Investigators said they found no evidence that another man had been inside. Instead, the affidavit said Herrera likely saw his girlfriend without pants through the window and drew his own conclusion that she had company. That conclusion, police wrote, appeared to flow from paranoia rather than anything officers could confirm through physical evidence, witness accounts or the condition of the home when they arrived.

The affidavit also places the confrontation in a wider relationship history that investigators said had already raised concern. Herrera “seems to be fixated” on whether the woman is cheating on him, the document said. Officers learned that many of the couple’s earlier arguments centered on Herrera wanting to search her cellphone and objecting when she went places without him knowing where she was. Those details do not resolve every question about what happened in the minutes before the stabbing, including how the argument began that day or what either person was doing immediately before the 911 call. But they do help explain why police described the case not as an isolated burst of anger, but as the latest episode in a longer pattern of suspicion and possessiveness.

Herrera’s criminal history is likely to shape what comes next. A detective wrote in the affidavit that he had prior domestic violence convictions. A 2025 opinion from Texas’ Seventh Court of Appeals said Herrera had already been convicted in McLennan County of assault family violence by occlusion, habitual, and assault causing injury family violence with a prior conviction. In that earlier case, the appellate court said a jury assessed concurrent 40-year prison terms after evidence showed Herrera attacked Marisa Espinoza during a 2022 dispute. The March 3 Waco case described in the new affidavit had not yet been docketed in the county court system when the Law&Crime report was published, and the precise charging path beyond the arrest stage was still not publicly laid out. That means it was not yet clear whether prosecutors would seek indictment, file additional counts or ask for stricter bond conditions tied to the allegations.

What is clear from the public record is the basic scene police say they encountered: a damaged home, an injured woman, a man outside in bloodied clothing and a story investigators said did not match the evidence. The neighborhood itself did not become the center of the case; the inside of the relationship did. The affidavit’s language points less to a random outburst than to a domestic conflict narrowed around one recurring accusation. In that telling, the broken glass and alleged stabbing were the visible result of a private argument police say had been building through repeated fights over the woman’s movements and phone. The woman’s account, the officers’ photographs and Herrera’s own statements at the scene are likely to remain central pieces of evidence if the case advances to indictment or trial.

Herrera’s case stood at the arrest stage as of early March reporting, with Herrera booked into the McLennan County Jail on $20,000 bond. He was no longer listed on the jail roster at the time of publication, and the next public milestone was expected to be the appearance of a filed case in county records or a court setting once prosecutors formally moved it forward.

Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.