Suspect in Mexican Murder Is Arrested in Oxnard

A Mexican national suspected of murder in his home country was arrested in Oxnard this week on immigration violations, authorities said Friday.

Gonzalo Vasquez Ortiz, 29, is a suspect in the November 2002 death of Samuel Diaz Aguilar, who was shot outside the Oaxaca municipal sports field after a dance, authorities said. Ortiz admitted to entering the United States in 2002 through Nogales, Ariz., and later moved to Ventura County.

Ortiz, who used a fake residency card, worked as a farm laborer and lived on Terrace Avenue in Oxnard. He was picked up without incident about 5 a.m. Thursday on his way to work, said Jorge Field, a supervisor in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Los Angeles.

“The first question he asked us is whether we were from immigration,” Field said. “We checked his resident alien card.... He admitted to being here illegally. It wasn’t a very good forgery, and he had a Social Security card that wasn’t very good either.”

Ortiz’s arrest came a week after the Aug. 4 apprehension of Miguel Garcia-Chavez, 49, a Mexican national who lived in Palmdale. Chavez was wanted in his native country in connection with the June 2003 killing of a man in a dispute over a herd of goats in the rural community of Tamazula de Gordiano.

On July 11, immigration agents arrested a man known as Mexico’s most-wanted fugitive: Alfredo Rios Galeana, who lived in Los Angeles County under the alias Arturo Montoya. A former paratrooper in the Mexican military, Galeana, who was arrested in South Gate, was suspected in a string of violent bank robberies in Mexico City and was the target of a nearly two-decade international manhunt.

Thursday’s arrest of Ortiz brought to 14 the number of Mexican nationals arrested in the last 10 months by immigration’s fugitive operations in Los Angeles. All were arrested on outstanding Mexican murder warrants.