On January 13, 2012, John Berry, a sixty-four-year-old Vietnam veteran who slept outdoors in Anaheim, was stabbed to death outside a Carl's Jr. restaurant in front of dozens of people. He had known he might be next. Three homeless men had been stabbed to death in north Orange County in the previous three weeks. Berry had talked to a Los Angeles Times reporter about the killer with open contempt and urged others to be careful, and on January 12 he told police that a young man was following him. He was asked to move into a shelter and refused. After the attack some witnesses chased the killer while others called the police, and officers arrested a twenty-three-year-old former Marine named Itzcoatl Ocampo close to the scene. He had tried to get rid of his bloodied clothes. A stainless steel knife with a seven-inch blade was taken from him.
Investigators said the knife matched the weapon used on the three earlier victims. James McGillivray, fifty-three, had been attacked as he slept outside a shopping center in Placentia on the night of December 20 or 21, 2011, and security cameras recorded it. Lloyd Middaugh, known as Jim, was found stabbed on a Santa Ana River trail in Anaheim on December 27; most reports give his age as forty-two, and at least one as fifty-three. On December 30 Paulus Cornelius Smit, fifty-seven, was found behind the public library in Yorba Linda, stabbed more than fifty times by one count and more than sixty by another. Police in several cities stepped up patrols around shelters, and outreach workers moved people indoors. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said Ocampo had chosen homeless men for their vulnerability, stalked them first and picked out more victims, and that he had selected Berry because Berry had appeared in the newspaper.
On January 17 Rackauckas charged him with four counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances, which made him eligible for the death penalty. The case then reached back to the previous fall. On October 25, 2011, Raquel Estrada, fifty-three, and her son Juan Herrera, thirty-four (thirty-five in some reports), had been stabbed to death at their home in Yorba Linda, Raquel about thirty times and Juan about sixty. Neighbors described the man they saw, and police arrested Eder Herrera, Raquel's younger son, a former classmate of Ocampo's who resembled him and who had argued with his mother and brother shortly before. Eder Herrera spent about three months in the county jail. In early February 2012 investigators reported DNA from both victims on Ocampo's clothing, the charges against Herrera were dropped and he was freed, and Ocampo was charged with the two deaths. An Orange County grand jury indicted him on six counts of murder.
Ocampo was born in Mexico City on March 20, 1988, the eldest of three children, and his family settled in Yorba Linda soon afterward; his father, a lawyer by training, found work repairing vacuum cleaners. He graduated from Esperanza High School in Anaheim in 2006, where he had been bullied over his height, and enlisted in the Marine Corps with several friends. He spent eight months in Iraq in 2008 moving water and fuel, never saw combat, and was punished and demoted for pointing his weapon at an ally. Back at Camp Pendleton the latch of a truck struck him hard on the back of the head. At home the family lost its house, his mother left his father, who was addicted to drugs, and his father ended up homeless. A close friend, a man named Patiño, was killed fighting in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on June 22, 2010, and Ocampo was honorably discharged the next month. Relatives watched him decline: headaches, tremors, heavy drinking, a refusal to see psychiatrists, and by late 2011 signs of delusion. According to grand jury testimony, he had said he joined the Marines because he needed to kill and was disappointed not to see combat.
He pleaded not guilty. His lawyer said he showed symptoms of psychosis and was not fit to stand trial, and prosecutors announced that they would seek his execution. Trial was set for 2014, with reports giving January and May. He never reached it. Over several weeks in the Orange County jail he stockpiled packets of Ajax cleanser, and on the evening of November 27, 2013, he swallowed them in his single cell. Deputies found him shaking and vomiting, and he died at a hospital in Santa Ana the following afternoon, November 28, at twenty-five.
Because he died untried, none of the six killings was proved in court. The witnesses outside the Carl's Jr., the knife and the DNA that freed Eder Herrera were never put before a jury, and in law he died an accused man.