On the evening of October 17, 2021, Oscar Ernesto Ayala, a 30-year-old Latino man, was standing outside in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of South Los Angeles when a vehicle pulled up and someone inside opened fire. The shooting occurred shortly before 8 p.m. in the 500 block of West 82nd Street. Ayala and a 13-year-old boy who was nearby were both struck by the gunfire.
Ayala’s injuries were fatal, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Paramedics transported the teenager to a hospital, and police subsequently reported that the boy had stable vital signs. Authorities publicly identified Ayala on October 19, two days after the shooting. The contemporaneous report did not explain the relationship between the two victims or what they had been doing before the vehicle approached.
Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner records identified Ayala’s cause of death as a gunshot wound and placed the incident near 538 West 82nd Street. The investigation was assigned to the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau Homicide unit. Early reporting provided no description of the vehicle and did not identify the person who fired the shots. Those accounts also did not establish a motive or explain whether either victim had been specifically targeted.
Later arrest information provides a limited, but unconfirmed, point of comparison with the reported developments in Ayala’s case. An arrest entry published by Local Crime News under Richard Muro’s name lists an LAPD arrest on October 23, 2025, on suspicion of murder, along with warrant-related entries. The website identifies Los Angeles Police as the source of the information. However, the entry does not name Ayala, identify the victim of the alleged murder, or provide a court case number connecting that arrest to the West 82nd Street shooting. It therefore does not establish that Muro was arrested for Ayala’s killing.
The same listing includes an earlier LAPD arrest dated August 16, 2022, with murder among the recorded offenses, but it likewise supplies no connection to Ayala. Neither entry establishes a conviction, and the absence of a release date does not confirm that the person named remains in custody. The reported arrest of Joe Andrew Salazar in connection with Ayala’s death could not be independently verified through the accessible online sources reviewed. No charging document or court disposition connecting either name to this homicide was located.
The available evidence does not justify describing Ayala’s killing as definitively unsolved today. The Los Angeles Times homicide entry belongs to an archive that stopped updating after December 29, 2023, so its silence about later arrests cannot establish the investigation’s current status. What remains unverified in the reviewed public sources is whether the reported arrests concern this shooting and whether any resulting prosecution has reached a plea, trial, or conviction.
