A Sister’s Surname Tied Raymond Ojeda’s 1991 Killer to the Man FBI Agents Shot Dead in Forest Park, Ohio
Santa Clara County closed a 33-year-old San Jose homicide by naming a man who was already buried. On September 28, 1991, 15-year-old Gerardo Aguilar shot and killed 14-year-old Raymond Ojeda, a high school freshman, during a gang confrontation on Foxdale Loop in East San Jose, near East Capitol Expressway and Story Road. Investigators identified Aguilar and issued a juvenile warrant. He was gone before anyone could serve it. The AEGIS Alliance is returning to the file because the killer was not in another country. He was living under a new last name in a Cincinnati suburb until FBI agents shot him in 2007 during a drug investigation that had nothing to do with a San Jose freshman. Nobody in Ohio that night knew they had just erased the defendant San Jose had been hunting since the first Bush administration.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s Cold Case Unit, opened in 2011, pulled the case back because families do not age out of wanting a name. Investigator John Cary ran family records and noticed Aguilar’s sister used the surname Mulato. A search for «Gerardo Mulato» turned up photographs of a man in Forest Park, Ohio, who looked like the teenage suspect grown older. That is not a cinematic stakeout. It is a records search, a face comparison, and the discipline to pay for a DNA test instead of declaring a resemblance good enough. The district attorney’s office said the lab work confirmed they were the same person. «Aguilar had been living in Ohio under the name Mulato for several years.»
El Mercury News, CBS Bay Area, NBC Bay Area, y KRON4 carried the identification in August 2024. San Jose police had the warrant during the original investigation. They could not find him. The Bay Area assumed he had left. He had.
A new last name did not buy a quiet life
The alias did not keep him out of local trouble. In 2004, still using Mulato, he was arrested in Springfield, Ohio, after an alleged assault with a baseball bat. In 2007 the FBI opened a drug-trafficking investigation. Prosecutors say Aguilar saw agents installing a tracker on his car, mistook them for thieves, and pulled a gun. An agent shot and killed him. Neither the Bureau nor local police knew that night that the dead man was a wanted California homicide suspect. The shooting closed an Ohio drug case and, without anyone realizing it, removed the only defendant the Foxdale Loop file would ever have.
That is the hard shape of a cold case that ends with a corpse instead of a verdict. Ojeda’s family will never sit through a trial. They will never watch a jury say the name in a Santa Clara courtroom. What they received in 2024 was an identification, a pair of photographs, and a prosecutor willing to say the file is no longer open. Rosen used the announcement to mark the unit’s other work: 20 homicides and 15 sexual-assault cold cases solved since 2018. «It’s never too late to identify a killer,» he said. «People may forget. But victims’ families and my office do not.»
What «solved» means when the shooter is already buried
Police departments like the word solved. Families hear something else. A solved case with a living defendant is a trial, a sentence, a chance to look at the person who pulled the trigger. A solved case with a dead defendant is a press release and a DNA match. Both can be true. Only one looks like justice in a hallway outside a courtroom. The AEGIS Alliance is not pretending the Forest Park shooting was punishment for Foxdale Loop. It was a separate federal encounter that happened to kill the person San Jose had named in 1991. The punishment, if that word even fits, was accidental. The identification was not.
Cary’s method is the part other offices should copy. He did not wait for a new witness to grow a conscience three decades later. He followed a sister’s surname, found a Midwestern man who looked like the boy in the 1991 packet, and paid for a DNA comparison. Look-alike identifications have wrecked other cases. The office says the lab closed the gap. Without it, «Gerardo Mulato» would have stayed a theory with a Cincinnati zip code.
East San Jose in 1991 was not short on gang shootings. A 14-year-old freshman dying on Foxdale Loop was one more night the city filed and then, for years, did not reopen. Juvenile warrants expire in the public mind even when they do not expire on paper. Aguilar was 15. He became an adult in Ohio, was booked there in 2004, died there in 2007, and only then, 17 years after the shooting, became a name on Santa Clara letterhead. The years in the middle belong to Ojeda’s relatives, who lived with a blank where a defendant should have been. A 2004 baseball-bat arrest in Springfield was a moment when a national warrant check could have spoken. It did not. No alarm rings by itself when a wanted juvenile from San Jose is fingerprinted in Ohio under a different last name. Someone has to go looking, and for a long time nobody did.
The same unit, a different San Jose killing, another man in Ohio
The Ojeda identification was not the unit’s last trip to Ohio. In May 2025, NBC Bay Area and ABC7 reported that the same Cold Case Unit had arrested 69-year-old Willie Eugene Sims in Ohio for the 1977 strangulation of 24-year-old Jeanette Ralston of San Mateo. She was found dead in her car after a night near a bar on Almaden Road in San Jose. Deputy District Attorney Rob Baker said investigators re-ran fingerprints from a cigarette carton in the car, matched them to Sims, and confirmed the link with DNA. The video above is that later announcement, not footage of Ojeda. It belongs in this file because it shows the method: old paper, a fresh database search, and a suspect who had been living in the same state where Aguilar died under another name. Sims was alive to be extradited. Aguilar was not. The difference is the whole story of what «closed» can mean.
Rosen’s unit was built in 2011 because homicide binders do not call themselves. DNA got cheaper. Alias searches got easier. The Ojeda file is an advertisement for that model and a warning about its limit. If the suspect dies on another agency’s scene, the originating county may not find out for 17 years. Cary found out because he typed a sister’s last name into a search bar and then refused to stop at a photograph.
The AEGIS Alliance tracks long-dormant files under cold cases y Crime News, including the West Rockhill neglect sentences that also turned on what investigators found after years of nobody looking, and the San Antonio trailer prosecutions that needed an extradition before a courtroom date existed. For a wider view of how institutions sit on names, see our U.S. News archivo.
Ojeda should have been a sophomore, then a graduate, then someone older than the boy who shot him. Instead he is a 1991 homicide number that finally has a closed box. Aguilar should have answered a juvenile petition in Santa Clara County. Instead he died in an FBI shooting that Ohio treated as a drug stop gone loud. The two stories met because an investigator followed a surname. That is not a satisfying ending. It is the ending the evidence supports, and The AEGIS Alliance is putting it on the record so the next family that waits decades knows the wait is not the same thing as a refusal to look.
