Omar Santos Loera went into the Reclusorio Oriente in Mexico City in 2011 on a robbery charge and came out of it convicted of a double homicide in Iztapalapa, for which he received one hundred and twenty-two years. He had given the authorities a false name, Erick Hernandez Camacho, which was the name of a friend of the woman he lived with, and that is the name the sentence was recorded against. In a brawl he had attacked people with a sabre, killing two and sending four more to the hospital, which is where the press nickname, the Ninja of Iztapalapa, came from. He was also called El Cojo, the Cripple, for a bullet wound to his right leg that left him walking with a cane. According to her father, a relative of his was already in the Reclusorio for the Iztapalapa killings when he arrived and pointed him out as the one who had done them, and the case against him changed from robbery to homicide. Accounts differ on whether that relative was a first cousin or a brother named Ricardo, for whom a warrant was issued and never executed.
On October 6, 2011, he escaped. Her father later said he had planned it in advance and got out the same day he was sentenced. With help from two civilians he dyed his prison uniform, forged documents and official seals, and passed six security checkpoints while a friend created a disturbance in the cells; some reports say he faked his own death. The Mexico City prosecution service opened an investigation to recapture him, and a reward of 300,000 pesos was offered, but he remained free for nine years.
By 2020 he was living in the Colonia Metropolitana Primera Seccion in Nezahualcoyotl with Elideth Rios Cabrera and their ten-year-old son. They had met at secondary school and had been together for almost ten years. She had been studying law at the National Autonomous University and was a year and a half from finishing when she left to live with him. She worked, as a waitress by one account, supported her parents and paid his way. Her family said he used his disability to pressure her whenever she tried to end the relationship. A week before she died she told him to leave, and telephoned her father to say he had agreed to go.
He killed her on the night of June 21, 2020, Father's Day in Mexico, and into the early hours of Monday, June 22. By one account he took their son to his grandmother first and told him that if anyone asked about his mother he should say she had fallen asleep; by another, the boy was in the apartment and later told his grandfather that there had been no argument, only his father insisting that his mother drink something he had prepared. He drugged her and, when she could no longer defend herself, strangled her. Her family said publicly that she had also been raped. Then he telephoned Gerardo Rios, her father, and told him he had killed her. Rios drove to the apartment; the State of Mexico police he had called on the way were already there, and his daughter was dead with signs of strangulation. Her age is given as twenty-nine, thirty and thirty-one in different reports.
The warrant took three months. Rios was told there were not sufficient grounds, and when the order finally issued it named Erick Hernandez Camacho, the false identity, not Omar Santos Loera, because there was no record of him under his own name. The State of Mexico prosecution service offered another reward of 300,000 pesos with the same wrong name on the notice. Authorities said the man under that name was wanted across Mexico and in the United States, but for the earlier offenses rather than for the killing of Elideth. Her family said this left an obvious escape route: he could be caught and then argue he was not the man the warrant named. Rios spent more than a year looking for him himself, much of it on a motorcycle, and believed for most of that time that nothing was being done; after he was allowed to see the investigation file, he said he had changed his mind.
He was recaptured at half past six in the evening of October 23, 2021, on Division del Norte street in the Doctor Jorge Jimenez Cantu neighborhood of Tlalnepantla de Baz, and taken to the offices of the State of Mexico prosecution service, where Rios was brought to identify him. He denied at first that he was Omar Santos Loera and then accepted it. A day later he was dead, hanged in custody. The prosecution service opened a file, NEZ/NEZ/NZ1/062/297024/21/10, under the heading of suicide. When the report was filed, nobody had come to the morgue for the body.
Two deaths are covered by a conviction and one is not, because the only person who could have been tried for it killed himself the day after he was finally caught. His surname has also appeared as Sanchez rather than Santos, and his age in 2020 as twenty-nine or thirty.