Tania Serrano was 18 years old when she died on Friday, June 5, 2009, in Long Beach. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, she died after sustaining blunt force trauma at 445 East 3rd Avenue. Her death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Long Beach Police Department case.
The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report gave only the most basic facts about her death: her name, her age, the date, the address and the cause. It described her as a Latina woman of 18. It did not say how she was hurt, whether the address was her home, or whether she died at the scene or later at a hospital.
Beyond her name, her age and the place where she died, almost nothing about Tania Serrano has been made public. No obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this story, and no news outlet appears to have reported on the death. She surely had family, friends or neighbors who remember who she was, but none of that has entered the public record. Her name is shared by many women, and searches turned up only namesakes, among them women living in Long Beach today, academic researchers in Europe and a woman arrested in New Mexico years later. None of those pages concerns the young woman who died in 2009.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say whether she was beaten in a fight, attacked by a stranger, assaulted indoors or on the street, or struck by a vehicle, all of which can lead to a finding of blunt force trauma. It does not say what time of day she was hurt, whether she died at the scene or later at a hospital, whether anyone saw what happened, or whether investigators ever identified a suspect.
Long Beach is the second-largest city in Los Angeles County and one of the largest in California. It is a port city on San Pedro Bay, home to one of the busiest container ports in the country, and it stretches from the beaches and marinas along its shoreline to dense neighborhoods of apartments and older homes inland. The city has its own police department, which investigates homicides within city limits, and it is one of the most diverse cities in the region, with large Latino, Black, white and Asian communities, including one of the largest Cambodian communities outside Cambodia.
Hundreds of people are killed in Los Angeles County every year, and a large share of those killings end without an arrest. The death of an 18-year-old woman in Long Beach received only a brief entry in the Homicide Report, and it appears never to have been covered by any other outlet.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Tania Serrano could be found in news archives or public records. More than 16 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who knew Tania from school, from work or from her neighborhood, or who was near the 400 block of East 3rd in Long Beach in early June 2009, may hold information that could help detectives give her family answers. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can contact the Long Beach Police Department's Homicide Detail at 562-570-7244, or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
