Do you know who murdered Octaviano? On Halloween night in 1992, Octaviano Zaragoza—a 31-year-old male who was without housing—was found comatose with grave head injuries in the narrow north–south alley behind Rick's Down Under tavern at 247 Washington Street, just east of Washington Jefferson Park in Eugene. His shoes had been stolen and his pack rifled, signs that a brief, brutal encounter spilled into robbery as the blows fell.
He later died of his wounds; the medical findings point to blunt force trauma from multiple strikes to the head, possibly inflicted with a piece of wood or another hard object.
Detectives traced the timeline to the late hours of October 31, 1992, or the earliest hour of November 1. It was Halloween in a neighborhood dense with foot traffic, parties, and bar patrons. Investigators have long believed that people coming and going from Rick's Down Under, the nearby Washington Jefferson Park basketball courts, or house gatherings that night may have witnessed the assault—or at least the moments before or after—and simply never realized what they saw could matter. Public appeals have emphasized that even a fragment of memory from that crowded night could help reconstruct the attack on the 31-year-old male.
No arrests have been announced in the killing of the 31-year-old male, and police have never publicly named a suspect. In recent years, Eugene's cold case investigators—volunteer former officers working alongside the Violent Crimes Unit—have renewed attention on Zaragoza's case, highlighting it among a small cluster of early-1990s homicides and expressing hope that modern DNA methods and crowdsourced memories can bridge the decades. Appeals for tips continue, with the case remaining open and unsolved.
