Ten years after her younger brother was killed in a flurry of
gunshots, Oralia Ramirez’s pain is as fresh as the day she lost
him.
Gilroy
Ten years after her younger brother was killed in a flurry of gunshots, Oralia Ramirez’s pain is as fresh as the day she lost him.
On the evening of Nov. 20, 1998, Gregorio Ramirez, 26, and several friends drove up from Watsonville looking for a party in Gilroy, said Stan Devlin, the Gilroy Police Department detective who has taken over Ramirez’s case. When an alcohol-fueled fight broke out at a party near Ninth and Eigleberry streets, Ramirez was shot and died at the scene.
The decade-old case quickly ran cold when few witnesses stepped forward, Devlin said.
“It’s under the cloud of a gang-type mentality,” he said. “No one wants to cooperate. No one wants to help. No one here knows who did it but friends of Mr. Ramirez do.”
But they’re not talking.
“Nobody saw or heard anything,” Oralia Ramirez said. “But of course I don’t believe that.”
The shroud of silence that enveloped the case has become nearly impenetrable as the years pass, but Oralia Ramirez still wants closure for her family. Her brother wasn’t an angel – he was mixed up in gangs when he was younger – but “he was tired of all that,” she said.
Several years before his murder, Gregorio Ramirez completed an intensive year-long residential treatment program called Si Se Puede in an effort to rid his life of the drugs, alcohol and gang violence that influenced him as a teen.
“He came in here with issues but he managed to overcome them,” said Jorge Sanchez, program manager and Gregorio Ramirez’s former counselor. “He had a big heart. Some of the younger members looked up to him.”
During his year of rehabilitation, Gregorio Ramirez managed to confront his alcohol addiction and began a new, sober life, Sanchez said.
“When I heard that this had happened, I couldn’t believe it,” Sanchez said. “He had really changed and was trying really hard. It saddens me that people are not cooperating with the police department for whatever reason and that the people who did this are still out there.”
One of 10 children, Gregorio Ramirez grew up in Watsonville and was affectionately nicknamed “Bear” by his brothers and sisters for his size, Oralia Ramirez said. Although he didn’t have children himself, her brother could often be found tossing a ball around with his nephews.
As she recovers from cancer and her parents age, Oralia Ramirez struggles to come to terms with the death of her brother. Ramirez used to call the GPD on a monthly basis and even though the volume of her calls has dropped, she is no less persistent.
“She’s really staying on top of it,” Devlin said. And though police have more pressing cases on its front burner, one of the first things Devlin sees when he walks into his office is a shelf of binders detailing Gregorio Ramirez’s homicide.
“We’re working these recent cases right now to prevent them from getting cold,” Devlin said of a series of gang-related crimes that occurred just two weeks ago, “but I haven’t forgotten Mr. Ramirez’s case.”
Gilroy has eight additional unsolved slayings, said Investigations Sgt. Noel Provost.
A particularly chilling case that remains unsolved surrounds two unidentified and badly decomposed bodies that were found clogging a sewer pipe in 1997, Devlin said. Weeks later, a head was found in an adjacent percolation pond that matched one of the bodies. Leads into the men’s identities have come and gone but they’ve all been dead ends so far.
Gilroy’s oldest unsolved killing case dates back to 1977 when two victims were gunned down in a gang-related home invasion on Carlyle Court in north Gilroy. With new advances in forensic science, some of the cases need to be revisited, Provost said, but the more recent killings take precedence.
Santa Clara County Sheriff’s tied up one loose ends in August, when a San Joaquin County jury found a Stockton woman guilty of first-degree murder for helping kill a man whose body later turned up near Hecker Pass Highway between Watsonville and Gilroy. Walter Wade White, 50, was found July 2006 wrapped in a blue tarp and dumped on the side of an isolated dirt road after being stabbed and beaten to death with a bat in his Stockton home.
The first 48 to 72 hours are critical to solving a homicide case, according to Charles Regini, a special agent assigned to the FBI/Metropolitan Police Department Cold Case Homicide Squad in Washington, DC.
“Witnesses are easier to locate, and their recollections generally prove more accurate soon after the incident,” he wrote in an essay entitled “The Cold Case Concept”. “Research has shown that in 66 percent of solved murder cases, police take a suspect into custody within 24 hours. If the case is not solved within 48 hours, the chances of it ever being solved fall markedly.”
“As more time goes by, witnesses and evidence deteriorate and these cases become more difficult to solve,” said Sgt. Jim Gillio.
“They’re always open,” Devlin said of the GPD’s roster of cold cases. “And they stay open until they’re closed.”
In an effort to find closure, Oralia Ramirez stays in close contact with local media sources and the police department, hoping something will heat the case up again.
“My main purpose in all this is to not let what happened to him go away,” she said. “The hope is that somebody finally says something.”
Anyone with information on crime can call police at 846-0350.
