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Slayings in TJ
Investigators gather clues in 4 slayings
TIJUANA — A letter sent from a California prison inmate, an identification card picked up in a Tijuana house, and numerous interviews with friends and family members are helping Baja California investigators piece together the events that led to last week's killings of four San Diego County residents. The victims' bodies, found strangled, stabbed and beaten, were discovered Saturday inside a parked Ford Aerostar van with California plates in an eastern Tijuana neighborhood.
Mexican authorities described the victims as young Mexican-Americans who frequently crossed from San Diego to party in Tijuana. The U.S. Consulate in Tijuana confirmed yesterday that all four were U.S. citizens: Brianna Hernandez Aguilera, 19; Carmen Jimena Ramos Chavez, 20; Oscar Jorge Garcia Cota, 23; and Luis Antonio Gamez, 21. “We are presuming that these people had connections in Mexico and the United States with criminals,” Baja California Attorney General Rommel Moreno Manjarrez said in an interview.
A key piece of evidence is a letter sent to Hernandez by a woman serving time in a California prison on a drug charge, Moreno said. He described the letter's tone as threatening and said “we are reviewing the text of the letter, line by line, with great seriousness.”
Family members have declined requests for interviews. Moreno said they have been cooperating with U.S. and Mexican investigators, providing information about the victims' relationships and backgrounds.
Relatives of the two women, both Chula Vista residents, have told investigators that the women went to Tijuana on Thursday night to party. On Friday night, family members filed a missing persons report after the women failed to answer their cell phones, the Chula Vista Police Department said.
All four bodies were found at 1 p.m. Saturday inside the van, parked in a residential neighborhood known as Loma Dorada. They had been dead for about 20 hours. An anonymous call to the communications center led police to the van, said Fermín Gómez, an assistant attorney general who oversees homicide investigations.
A key piece of evidence came sometime later – it was unclear what day – when a separate tip led soldiers and federal police to a house in the same neighborhood. Inside, they found bloodstains and an identification card belonging to one of the victims, said Moreno, the attorney general. Moreno said at least one of the victims, Hernandez, had tested positive for cocaine. “The information that we have is that they were going to a party,” Moreno said.
Mexican authorities said they did not know if any of the victims had criminal records. One of the men, Garcia, was arrested on suspicion of alien smuggling in January 2008 after he was stopped while driving a vehicle with six illegal immigrants aboard, but he was not charged, said Lauren Mack, spokeswoman in San Diego for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The two women were recent graduates of Chula Vista High School, Sweetwater Union High School District spokeswoman Lillian Leopold confirmed. Garcia attended Southwest High School in Nestor but did not graduate, she said.
Emily Allison, Ramos' English teacher at Chula Vista High, said, “All of her teachers adored her.” Allison described the girl she called “Carmelita” as “totally driven. She was communicative. She was beautiful. She was very bubbly, very chipper.” Allison taught Ramos as both a freshman and as a senior in a college prep English course. Ramos graduated in 2007.
Allison said she understood that Ramos and her friends liked to go to Tijuana on Thursdays for ladies' nights at clubs but characterized her as “sweet” and “classy.” “I have not spoken to her in at least a year, but I know that she was not involved in anything shady,” Allison said.
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