Javier Cano Castillo, 36, a Hispanic/Latino man, was found shot to death in his pickup truck on the evening of Friday, October 7, 2022, at a Conoco gas station near South Wadsworth Boulevard and Hampden Avenue in Lakewood, Colorado. Lakewood police said the shooter briefly got into a gray Audi at the pumps and drove away after roughly half a minute, leaving Castillo mortally wounded in the vehicle. The station’s address was reported as 3440 S. Wadsworth Blvd., just north of Highway 285, and investigators released images as they searched for the suspect in the days after the killing. Although some memorial listings placed the loss in Littleton, local news coverage and police statements identified the scene in Lakewood.
Within two weeks, detectives identified 35-year-old Oscar Gutierrez as the suspect in Castillo’s killing. On October 19, 2022, Lakewood detectives and Denver’s Metro SWAT team moved to serve an arrest warrant at an apartment on the 16300 block of East 49th Avenue in Denver. After hours of attempted negotiations, officers entered and found Gutierrez dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. With the suspect deceased, police did not make an arrest in the case; media accounts and police summaries tie Gutierrez to Castillo’s death and indicate the investigation led to that final standoff.
Castillo was publicly identified as a Denver resident, and Spanish-language coverage noted the victim’s Hispanic heritage. Community memorial pages and grave records preserve his name and date of death, while incident databases log the Lakewood shooting and the subsequent SWAT operation in Denver. No additional suspects have been reported by authorities beyond Gutierrez, and there have been no later arrests announced in connection with the homicide.
