California authorities have solved a 33-year-old cold case, identifying the killer of a teenage boy who was murdered in 1991.
Authorities revealed on Tuesday that a 14-year-old California boy, Raymond Ojeda, who was murdered 33 years ago, was killed by a man later gunned down by the FBI in 2007 while living under a different identity in Ohio.
The killer, Gerardo Aguilar, was 15 at the time of the 1991 shooting in San Jose. Although identified and a juvenile warrant issued, Aguilar vanished before his arrest. Earlier this year, the DA’s Cold Case Unit linked Aguilar to a man in Ohio living under the name Gerardo Mulato, a deceased individual.
Breakthrough by Cold Case Unit
The long-unsolved case took a significant turn when the district attorney’s Cold Case Unit identified a man living in Ohio under the name Gerardo Mulato as a potential match for Aguilar. John Cary, an investigator with the unit, discovered that the man’s sister had the last name Mulato and used that information to track down the suspect in Forest Park, Ohio, near Cincinnati. DNA analysis later confirmed that the man living as Gerardo Mulato was indeed Gerardo Aguilar.
The 2007 FBI shootout
Aguilar, who had been living under his sister’s last name, managed to avoid detection for years. In 2004, he was arrested in Springfield, Ohio, for assaulting someone with a baseball bat. Three years later, in 2007, Aguilar’s life came to a violent end. He was under investigation by the FBI for drug trafficking when he spotted agents installing a tracking device on his car. Mistaking them for car thieves, he pulled a gun and shot one of the agents. In the ensuing shootout, Aguilar was fatally shot by the FBI.
“It’s never too late to identify a killer,” said District Attorney Jeff Rosen. “People may forget, but victims’ families and my office do not.” The resolution of Raymond Ojeda’s murder brings a measure of closure to a case that has haunted his family and the community for decades. The breakthrough demonstrates the persistence of law enforcement and the power of modern investigative techniques in solving even the oldest cases.