Eusebia Elizabeth Cabrera Benitez was 32 years old when she died on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2019. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, she died of stab wounds. Her death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a case of the Los Angeles Police Department's Robbery-Homicide Division.
The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report described her only as "a 32-year-old Latino female" who "died Saturday, Sept. 28, after being stabbed." Unlike almost every other entry in the report, hers gives no address and no neighborhood. The public record does not even say where in Los Angeles she was hurt or where she died.
Beyond her name, her age and the place where she died, almost nothing about Eusebia Elizabeth Cabrera Benitez 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.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say whether she was stabbed during a fight or a robbery, attacked by a stranger or by someone she knew, or hurt indoors or on the street. 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.
Her full name, with two surnames, follows a naming custom common across Latin America, in which a person carries both a father's and a mother's family name. In other records she may appear as Eusebia Cabrera, Elizabeth Cabrera or Eusebia Benitez, and the people with those names who appear in searches, including a fundraiser donor in Oregon and women named in obituaries in other states, cannot be connected to her. That makes it harder to trace any record of her life.
Two details in the record stand out. The first is the missing location, which is rare in the Homicide Report and may mean that the place was withheld or simply never entered. The second is the agency. The Robbery-Homicide Division is the Los Angeles Police Department's elite downtown unit, which typically takes on high-profile, complex or sensitive investigations rather than routine neighborhood cases. The assignment suggests that detectives may have seen something unusual about her death, but the record does not say what it was, and that is only an inference drawn from the name of the unit.
Los Angeles recorded about 260 homicides a year in 2018 and 2019, among the lowest yearly totals in more than half a century, yet many of those killings still went unsolved.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Eusebia Elizabeth Cabrera Benitez could be found in news archives or public records. More than six years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who knew a 32-year-old woman named Eusebia or Elizabeth Cabrera Benitez in Los Angeles in September 2019, who knew where she lived or worked, or who heard talk about how she died, may hold information that could help detectives. 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 call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
