Lucio Solorzano, 84, was beaten to death on Sunday, May 17, 2009, in the 7000 block of Reisterstown Road in Northwest Baltimore. He died of blunt force injuries. The Baltimore Police Department investigated, and the Baltimore Sun's homicide database lists his death as a homicide.
Police said Solorzano got into an argument with a man at about 7 p.m. that Sunday in a wooded area behind a Texaco station on Reisterstown Road.
The Baltimore Sun reported that he was "fatally beaten with his own cane after arguing with a man during an evening stroll." What the two men were arguing about, the paper wrote a week later, "remains elusive."
Solorzano was born in Peru in 1925 and moved to the United States as a young man. He became a citizen, raised a family and, with the help of his sons and daughter, built a successful landscaping business that mowed lawns and painted houses for some of the Baltimore area's wealthiest residents. One longtime client, David Nevins, a member of the University of Maryland Board of Regents who had hired the family to care for his yard in Green Spring Valley, told the Sun, "This is what America is all about," and added, "Lucio and his wife had incredible skill in raising a family in challenging circumstances." Solorzano left behind a widow in her 70s, four grown sons, a daughter and many grandchildren. His family received friends at the Eline Funeral Home on Reisterstown Road on Thursday, May 21, 2009.
Police quickly arrested a 35-year-old man who lived a few blocks away, and he was charged with first-degree murder. The case then came apart. One witness was deported. Two others, including the man who said he saw the beating, disappeared. Prosecutors took DNA evidence from the cane but could not match it to the suspect. The prosecutor, Blomquist, persuaded immigration officials to let a key witness stay in the country to testify, sent social workers to find him and obtained arrest warrants for all three witnesses. After three postponements, the time ran out. In May 2010 the prosecutor told the court, "It is with reluctance and a great deal of frustration that the state is going to enter a nolle prosse," and the murder charge was dropped. Afterward Blomquist said, "We are all trying to get justice and obviously, dropping a case is not justice."
Reisterstown Road is one of Northwest Baltimore's main commercial corridors, lined with gas stations, shops and bus stops, and it carries heavy traffic toward the city line and Baltimore County.
Baltimore recorded roughly 200 to 280 homicides a year between 2007 and 2014, one of the highest rates of any large American city, and many of those killings were never solved.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Lucio Solorzano, other than the dropped charge, could be found in news archives or public records. More than 17 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. The witnesses who were at the scene behind the gas station in the 7000 block of Reisterstown Road on that Sunday evening in May 2009, and anyone they spoke with afterward, may still hold the answers this case needs. 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 Baltimore Police homicide detectives at 410-396-2100, or leave an anonymous tip with Metro Crime Stoppers of Maryland at 1-866-7LOCKUP (1-866-756-2587).
