Decades-old cold case cracked with discovery 14-year-old boy’s murderer died in shootout with feds

California authorities have uncovered the identity of a suspect in the murder of a teenage boy that happened more than three decades ago.

The Santa Clara District Attorney ’s Office has tied the 1991 murder of 14-year-old Raymond Ojeda back to Gerardo Aguilar, who was killed during a 2007 shootout with the FBI in Ohio . The federal agency had been investigating him for drug trafficking at the time.

Ojeda died in a gang-related confrontation in San Jose on 28 September 1991, the district attorney’s office said in a statement. At the time, Aguilar was just 15 and although officials issued a juvenile arrest warrant for him they were not able to locate him and he disappeared.

The case was ultimately solved by the city’s cold case unit.

The unit located a man living in Ohio under the name Gerardo Mulato and thought he could potentially be Gerardo Aguilar. John Cary, an investigator with the unit, found out the man’s sister’s last name was Mulato and searched for the suspect under that name.

The search yielded results for a man who looked like the suspect in Forest Park, Ohio, close to Cincinnati. DNA analysis later confirmed the two identities were for the same person. Aguilar managed to live in Ohio for several years under his sister’s last name.

Before the shootout, he had been arrested in 2004 for assault with a baseball bat in Springfield. In 2007, Aguilar spotted FBI agents putting a tracking system on his car. He thought the agents were car thieves and pulled a gun on an agent and shot him. Officials fatally shot the man in return.

“It’s never too late to identify a killer,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said. “People may forget. But victims’ families and my office do not.”