TAVARES, Fla. -- Daniel Aguilera tried so hard to forget the past, he couldn't even remember his birthday.
Aguilera, 42, who had assumed a new identity -- Gerardo Aguilera Vargas -- and lived a new life with a wife and four children in Avon Park was arrested Tuesday on a warrant for the murder of a mother of four 19 years ago in Mascotte.
"He tried to forget about everything, to put it out of his mind and move on, and had forgotten his own date of birth until [the detective] reminded him," Lake sheriff's Lt. John Herrell said. "It's like one of those Lifetime movies."
Herrell said the past caught up with Aguilera when Lake sheriff's detective Mark Knuuttila, a member of the U.S. Marshal's fugitive task force, arrested Aguilera at Big T Tire, where he had worked for the past decade in Avon Park, about 80 miles south of Mascotte.
"I never would have figured this," said Terry Portis, co-owner of the tire business, who described Aguilera as polite. "Our customers loved him...It just shocks me. He was a father who had his kids with him all the time. It's like two different people."
He said Aguilera occasionally took time off to pick apples up north.
His oldest son, Gerardo, 15, said he knew nothing of his father's alleged past.
"I just found out," said the teen, adding that law-enforcement authorities interviewed him at school Tuesday. "I don't know what to say."
He said his father was a good dad.
Detectives credited a tip from a confidential informant for helping them find Aguilera, who is charged with premeditated murder in the killing of Xochitl Patino, 35, fatally wounded Nov. 13, 1992, outside her home on West Myers Boulevard in Mascotte.
Herrell said Aguilera admitted to Knuuttila that he was responsible for the Mascotte mother's death, expressing remorse for a mistake he blamed on his youth and saying that he tried to start a new life.
The shooting occurred after an argument -- likely about money, police said -- with Patino's common-law husband, Alejandro Cedillo. A police report said the first bullet whizzed over Cedillo's shoulder and the next one hit Patino. She fell onto her back, dead.
Aguilera, who was identified by Cedillo and another eyewitness, Patino's brother, Arturo Patino, sped away in a blue Ford Crown Victoria and eluded police for nearly two decades, though police combed the area, notified neighboring law-enforcement agencies and provided the U.S. border patrol with Aguilera's photograph.
Authorities thought Aguilera fled to Mexico and might have been killed there.
"This was way before our time," Mascotte police Lt. Greg Woodworth said. "We just got lucky."
Copyright 2011 - The Orlando Sentinel, Fla.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
