1991 San Jose Cold Case Solved: 14-Year-Old Raymond Ojeda’s Teen Killer Was Gunned Down by FBI in Ohio
A San Jose murder that went unsolved for more than three decades has finally been put to rest — with the discovery that the killer had been dead for 17 years. The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office announced that 14-year-old Raymond Ojeda’s killer was a teenager who fled California, lived for years under a false name in Ohio, and was ultimately shot dead by the FBI in 2007.
On September 28, 1991, 15-year-old Gerardo Aguilar shot and killed Ojeda during a gang-related confrontation in the Foxdale Loop area of East San Jose. Investigators identified Aguilar as the shooter and issued a juvenile arrest warrant, but he disappeared before officers could find him, and the trail went cold.
Decades later, the DA’s Cold Case Unit — established by District Attorney Jeff Rosen in 2011 — revisited the file. The break came from a hunch by investigator John Cary, who ran a background check on Aguilar’s family and noticed that Aguilar’s sister carried the surname Mulato. Searching for “Gerardo Mulato,” Cary turned up online photos of a man in Forest Park, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, who bore a striking resemblance to the suspect.
DNA analysis confirmed the match. “DNA analysis confirmed they were the same person. Aguilar had been living in Ohio under the [last] name Mulato for several years,” the District Attorney’s office stated. The teenage fugitive had built an entire adult life behind an assumed identity.
That life was far from quiet. In 2004, while going by Mulato, he was arrested in Springfield, Ohio, for an alleged assault with a baseball bat. Then, in 2007, the FBI began investigating him for drug trafficking. According to prosecutors, Aguilar spotted agents installing a tracking device on his car and — apparently mistaking them for car thieves — pulled a gun. One of the agents shot and killed him. Neither the FBI nor local authorities realized at the time that the man they had just killed was a wanted California murder suspect.
Closing the 33-year-old case offers a measure of justice and closure to Raymond Ojeda’s family, even though the man responsible can never be brought to trial. The DA’s office noted it has solved 20 homicides and 15 sexual-assault cold cases since 2018, with the Cold Case Unit also working to track down living suspects in decades-old killings.
“It’s never too late to identify a killer,” Rosen said. “People may forget. But victims’ families and my office do not.” For more on long-dormant investigations finally cracked, see our cold cases coverage.
