A 48-year-old Hawaiian Gardens woman was shot to death inside a home in Long Beach's Zaferia neighborhood in the middle of the night, and police have arrested her boyfriend on suspicion of murder. Officers were sent to the 1400 block of Redondo Avenue near 15th Street shortly after calls came in around 3 a.m., where they found Suzette Aparijo suffering from a gunshot wound. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Long Beach Police Department homicide detectives determined that a male adult suspect was responsible for Aparijo's death, according to a police release cited by CBS Los Angeles. Officers identified the suspect as 45-year-old Juan Antonio Cruz, who was in a dating relationship with Aparijo, and took him into custody. He was booked into the Long Beach City Jail on suspicion of murder, with bail set at $2 million, police said. The shooting happened inside the residence on Redondo Avenue, according to Long Beach Post, which places the scene in the Zaferia neighborhood of East Long Beach.
Motive Still Unclear as Case Heads to Prosecutors
Police say the motive and circumstances surrounding the shooting remain under investigation. The case was expected to be presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office for filing consideration in the coming days, per the police release. Whether there was any recorded history of domestic disturbance calls or protective orders involving the couple at the Redondo Avenue address beforehand has not been disclosed, and remains an open question for investigators.
Long Beach police are asking anyone with information to contact homicide detectives Thai and Contreras at 562-570-7244. Under California Penal Code Section 187, murder is defined as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought, and it carries a sentence of 25 years to life for a first-degree conviction or 15 years to life for second-degree, according to the Shouse Law Group. It will fall to the District Attorney's office to determine which degree to file based on evidence of premeditation.
A Historic Neighborhood With a Railway Past
Zaferia, where the shooting took place, has a history stretching back more than a century. The neighborhood was originally established as a commercial hub around a 1904 Pacific Electric Railway depot at Anaheim Street and Obispo Avenue, taking its name from early settler E.H. Zaferia, according to the City of Long Beach. It was annexed into the city in 1920 and today remains a mixed residential and commercial pocket of East Long Beach.
Homicide Falls Even as Domestic Violence Persists
The killing comes even as Long Beach has seen violent crime trend downward. The city recorded a 27% drop in homicides during the first half of 2025, falling from 18 to 13, along with a 29% decline in overall shooting incidents compared with the five-year average, per the Long Beach Post's reporting on crime statistics. The Long Beach Police Department also reported handling more than 187,000 calls for service in 2025, with an average Priority 1 response time of 5.5 minutes and a 76.3% homicide clearance rate, according to the City of Long Beach's annual accountability report.
Even with those citywide declines, intimate partner violence remains a stubborn problem. Statewide data from the California Department of Justice shows domestic violence was identified as a contributing factor in 14.1% of California homicides with known circumstances in 2025, even as total homicides across the state dropped 17.5%, as reported by ABC10. Los Angeles County averaged 740 domestic violence calls for law enforcement assistance per 100,000 female residents annually between 2018 and 2022, according to the California Budget & Policy Center, which also notes the county ranks 19th lowest among California's 58 counties in domestic violence call rates.
Academic research analyzing intimate partner homicides in Los Angeles County, published by the National Institutes of Health, found that a preceding verbal argument was documented in a significant share of fatal domestic cases, drawing on National Violent Death Reporting System records. This is not the first case of its kind that Hoodline has covered in Long Beach; a similar case in 2024 also ended with a fatal stabbing and $2M bail. For now, the exact circumstances that led to Aparijo's death remain under investigation, and no charges have yet been formally filed against Cruz.
