April 02, 2022
On the 26th of April 2011, at approximately 11:30pm, the plastic wrapped, nude body of 17 year-old Michelle Lozano was found by a homeless man near Freeway (5), State Street and Caesar Chavez Avenue near Boyle Heights in Los Angeles.
Her body was wrapped in plastic and had spilled out of a plastic container that seemed to have been thrown over the barrier of the freeway where it opened on impact.
It would be later be determined that the teenage girl had been raped and strangled to death. Lozano was last seen standing outside of Lincoln high school, around two miles from where her body was discovered.
Several months later on Boxing Day of 2011, at 7:30pm, 22 year old mother of two Bree’Anna Guzman went missing.
She neglected to return home after leaving her residence at around 7.30pm in search of cough drops at the local “Rite aid” pharmacy.Just a stones throw away from her home.
“I’ll be right back” she said on her way out.
She never returned.
She was found murdered a month later along the (2) freeway, near Riverside drive and Echo park in LA. As you can see by this map, her body was discovered very close to where the body of Lozano was found a few months earlier. She too had been raped and strangled.
Both murders went unsolved for six years until earliy 2017 when the LAPD finally got a break in the case.
After running DNA found at the scene through all available databases and coming up with nothing, they made a request to run it through a familial DNA database; an apparently difficult request to get granted. However, in this instance the state attorneys general office gave the go ahead for investigators to do a familial DNA search to aid them in solving the cold case.
When they performed a search they didn't come up with an exact match, but something close enough to point them in the suspect’s direction; the DNA of the perpetrators father. The man responsible for the rape and murder of the two girls was then identified as a 32 year-old man named Geovanni Borjas. The 6”1, 250lb man was unknown to local authorities and had no previous criminal record.
Armed with this new information, the LAPD began following Borjas and after several days managed to obtain a sample of his DNA after he spat on the ground while out walking one day. It was retrieved and compared to that of the DNA found at the crime scenes of both victims and found to be an exact match.
The LAPD claimed that they had always suspected that the murders of both girls were connected. How he managed to take the girls is still unknown. The two victims were apparently strangers to each other and when their families looked at the picture of the killer they knew that they had never seen him before.
A background check on Geovanni Borjas showed that he had at one point lived in Lincoln heights, which as we can see, was the area where Bree’ Anna Guzman lived.
He was arrested on the 25th of May, 2017.
Looking at his criminal record his campaign of violence against women did not stop at his last victim, but continued in the form of domestic violence against his own partner in 2014. She eventually managed to take out a 3 year restraining order against Borjas for various assaults and domestic violence; the very same crime that had landed his father in jail and got his DNA entered in the database.
Geovanni Borjas was charged with 2 counts of rape and murder and one count of kidnapping.
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November 19, 2024
