The search for a suspect in a 33-year-old San Jose murder case has culminated posthumously, as the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Unit announced that it had identified the man who was living under an assumed name in Ohio before he died in 2007. The suspect, Gerardo Aguilar, also known as Gerardo Mulato, was involved in a shootout with the FBI, which led to his death nearly two decades ago. The FBI had been investigating him for separate charges of drug trafficking.
"It’s never too late to identify a killer," District Attorney Jeff Rosen stated, according to the County of Santa Clara. His office has notably been able to successfully solve 20 homicides and 15 sexual assault cold cases since 2018. In a case reaching back to September 28, 1991, Aguilar, then just 15, shot 14-year-old Raymond Ojeda during what was described as a gang-related confrontation in San Jose's Foxdale Loop area. A juvenile arrest warrant was issued, but Aguilar eluded local authorities and vanished without a trace.
This year, a breakthrough surfaced when the DA’s Cold Case Unit, on an investigator’s hunch, managed to track down a man living under Gerardo Mulato. Investigator John Cary cross-referenced the last name of Aguilar's sister with that moniker and discovered a person in Forest Park, Ohio, sparking further investigation. The Cold Case Unit confirmed Aguilar’s identity through DNA analysis, thus closing the loop on a mystery spanned over three decades.
Before his fatal encounter with the FBI, Aguilar had been arrested in 2004 for assault with a baseball bat in Springfield. When he spotted FBI agents surreptitiously installing a tracking device on his car in 2007, he mistakenly assumed they were car thieves, which tragically led to an exchange of gunfire and, ultimately, his death.
