On the night of June 11, 2003, 27-year-old Hispanic man Benjamin Benji Baez Jr. was shot in the chest while riding in the passenger seat of a friend’s parked car on Main Street in Hartford, Connecticut. Another man approached the vehicle shortly before midnight, a verbal argument ensued, and the man fired a single shot. Baez was taken to St. Francis Hospital but died from the wound.

The case stalled for years as many witnesses refused to cooperate, leaving the murder among Hartford’s unsolved cold cases and a lasting blow to a family that had lost another son, Harry Baez, the year before. The case later appeared in a deck of cold case playing cards distributed in the state corrections system.

A major break came in October 2017 when Hartford detectives arrested 40-year-old Rafael Felo Ortiz in New York after uncovering new evidence linking him to the shooting. Prosecutors said the confrontation was over a dispute about drug sales; the trial record included an account that Baez had asked to sell drugs for Ortiz, was refused, and then threatened to rob Ortiz, which preceded the shooting. A jury later convicted Ortiz of murder and he received a 50-year sentence.