Angel Mejia, 21, was found dead in the New Orleans area in June 1999, his body left near a trash bin in Kenner, Louisiana, a place of bright storefront lights and hard edges where people passed by every day without expecting to meet death. Investigators said he had been strangled, and details that surfaced later in reporting suggested he had been restrained—marks consistent with bindings feeding the suspicion that whoever killed him had controlled his movements before ending his life.
At the time, Mejia’s killing was spoken of alongside other eerily similar deaths in the same corridor of suburban streets: young men discovered without their shoes, bodies discarded with a blunt, careless efficiency that felt more like a routine than a one-time act. Kenner police believed Mejia’s death was linked to the strangling death of Manuel Reed, whose body had been found in a garbage bin weeks earlier, and to the earlier killing of 16-year-old Joseph Brown—cases that tightened into a pattern and began to look less like isolated violence and more like a predator moving through the region.
Years passed before the wider picture snapped into focus. In early December 2006, a multi-agency task force arrested Ronald J. Dominique in Houma after what authorities described as forensic evidence pointed to him, and they booked him initially in connection with two of the early cases they were investigating. Public statements at the time emphasized that the investigation was ongoing and that additional charges were possible, as detectives worked backward through a long trail of stranglings spread across multiple parishes.
In the end, Dominique’s case became known nationally for its scope. He was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2008 for a series of murders committed across Louisiana, and accounts of the killings include Mejia among the victims attributed to Dominique, placing his death within a broader spree that stretched from the late 1990s into the mid-2000s.
