Gilroy
– Oralia Ramirez says she’s not about to stop prodding
investigators to find out who killed her younger brother, Gregorio,
nearly six years ago at the corner of Ninth and Eigleberry
streets.
The killing of Gregorio Ramirez, 26, of Watsonville, is one of
four unsolved homicides in Gilroy, according to Dan Zen, the Gilroy
Police Department’s robbery and homicide detective.
”
Anyone who is killed deserves justice,
”
Oralia, of Watsonville, said.
Gilroy – Oralia Ramirez says she’s not about to stop prodding investigators to find out who killed her younger brother, Gregorio, nearly six years ago at the corner of Ninth and Eigleberry streets.
The killing of Gregorio Ramirez, 26, of Watsonville, is one of four unsolved homicides in Gilroy, according to Dan Zen, the Gilroy Police Department’s robbery and homicide detective.
“Anyone who is killed deserves justice,” Oralia, of Watsonville, said.
The other unsolved killings are a three-decades-old murder outside a downtown bar, a pair of mysterious bodies found at the city sewer plant in 1997– still unidentified – and a drive-by shooting at an east-side soccer field in 2001.
Zen works on these cases whenever he has time or whenever a new lead develops. Relatives call periodically to check if he’s found anything new; Oralia Ramirez is among the most persistent. Every time she calls, he has to say the same thing: The witnesses to her brother’s death still refuse to talk, and there’s nothing else to go on.
From cold case to trial
Sometimes, patience pays big dividends. A year-and-a-half ago, Zen was investigating a fifth cold case, the murder of Juan Trigueros, 24, of Soledad, outside the Leavesley Road 7-Eleven store in May 2001. Now, 23-year-old Gilroyan Paul Zapata is set to go to trial this month for the crime.
Like the other cases, Zen inherited the 7-Eleven shooting from a previous detective, but a couple of anonymous tips on his watch led to a match on the getaway vehicle and, from there, to Zapata’s arrest in April 2003. Police say Zapata belongs to a local Norteño gang and shot Trigueros simply because he looked like a Mexican national.
Soccer field drive-by
It was 10pm on a Saturday in March 2001. Eloy Avendano, 40, and his brother, 30, were anticipating a soccer match the next morning and were checking out the South Valley Junior High field. They were reportedly fixing a goal post when a red or burgundy hatchback car drove by with four occupants, who fired bullets.
Avendano was hit in the temple and died. His brother was also hit but recovered.
He was a Mexican national. At least one witness said the car’s occupants yelled, “Puro norte” (pure north), but others didn’t hear this, according to Zen. Avendano had no gang involvement, police said.
Ramirez ‘brought a knife to a gunfight’
Gregorio Ramirez was a known Norteño member in Watsonville, according to both his sister and Zen.
“I never said he was perfect,” Oralia said. “He was going through some programs to try to get away from that.”
According to Zen, Gregorio and a friend came to Gilroy, drank (his autopsy showed he was under the influence), met a couple of Norteño girls and got in a fight with, police believe, at least one male Norteño – who had a gun.
The Watsonville men had a knife and stabbed a male and a female, police said, but “They brought a knife to a gunfight,” according to Zen. Both were shot, Ramirez in the back and shoulder. His friend and the stab victims lived.
Detective Steve Baty, now retired, questioned people, but “The problem he ran into was the code of silence with gangsters,” Zen said.
Gregorio was killed just before Thanksgiving 1998, now the Ramirez family wants closure while they’re still alive. Two years ago, Oralia was diagnosed with breast cancer, she said. Her parents, aged 70 and 64, have recurring health problems.
“They say, before they pass away, they want to see justice,” Oralia said.
Sewer plant bodies
Cases don’t get much colder than this: City workers found the badly decomposed remains of two men in a sewer pipe, but more than seven years later, despite extensive DNA tests with missing persons and a television feature on “America’s Most Wanted,” police still don’t know who the men were or how they died.
The investigation began on July 16, 1997, when a sewer worker found a man’s torso clogging a concrete sewer junction box on Southside Drive. Two weeks later, a worker found a second body in the same place. A month-and-a-half later, a head was found in an adjacent percolation pond. It was matched to the first body.
The second man had the remains of a plastic bag tied around his neck, leading Devlin to suspect they were murdered by suffocation.
A dental expert confirmed the men are Hispanic from their teeth. This examination required GPD Sgt. John Sheedy to fly to Orange County and back in 1999 with the two heads as carry-on items. As Sheedy passed the heads through the security X-ray machine, “Nobody batted an eye. I (was) waiting for somebody to go absolutely bonkers.”
Leads into the men’s identities have come and gone, but they’ve all been dead-ends so far. One of the hottest came about two months ago, when a Chula Vista man said his brother had been missing for years. Zen said he got excited when the photo of the man looked like a clay mock-up of the second victim, but DNA didn’t match.
The bones are still at the Santa Clara County Coroner’s Office, though police have all the DNA they need, Zen said. There has been talk of cremating them to make space, and someone Zen identified as a “do-gooder” asked permission to bury the men in Mexico, but Zen is hesitant. If he and Devlin discover the identities, he doesn’t want to have to tell relatives he already gave the bodies away.
Oldest cold case
If there is one case Zen isn’t actively investigating, it is that of a man found dead behind a bar in a downtown alley in the 1970s.
“I don’t want to say it’s forgotten, but it’s been so long,” Zen said.
Still, detectives say, they never know when an ex-spouse or other associate will decide to make a cold case like this one red-hot again.
“That’s one of the ways some of these are resolved,” he said. “Someone finally gets bothered by the thought of that crime happening, and they want to share it.”
