A long-time detective in the Arlington County Police Department retired this week.
Det. Rosa Ortiz served her last day on the force yesterday (Thursday) following decades of Arlington sex crime and homicide investigations, including the 2009 murder of Carl Diener and the 1999 murder of Eva Veliz.
Motivating her over the years, she told ARLnow, was a drive to seek the truth of each case and help families find answers.
“We learn through our career that we are the voice of the decedent,” Ortiz said. “It’s up to us to find out what happened.”
Ortiz joined ACPD in 1992 and began working in the Criminal Investigations Division in 1999. She has helped close high-profile cases that had gone cold for years, including an international investigation into the Veliz case.
Veliz’s killer, Ludvin Estrada, had fled to Guatemala and could not be found after her death. The case was assigned to ACPD’s cold case unit in 2012.
To locate Estrada, the department coordinated with Diplomatic Security Service, the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s Office of International Affairs, the U.S. Marshals Service and Guatemalan National Police.
Ortiz was part of the joint investigation team that successfully located and extradited Estrada in 2016, before his later sentencing to 45 years in prison for Veliz’s murder.
“That [case] was featured in the National Law Enforcement Museum because it really captured cooperation between a local agency and a federal agency to take a homicide suspect into custody,” ACPD spokeswoman Ashley Savage said.
Among other accomplishments, Ortiz helped solve a 1992 rape case with DNA technology in 2014, and traveled to Puerto Rico to provide mutual aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
She also investigated missing persons cases, robberies, auto theft and property crimes, and assisted her colleagues as a Spanish translator.
In total, Ortiz said she probably closed at least a dozen sex crimes and six or seven homicides. Looking back, however, she said she never originally intended to be in this line of work.
“I joined the force completely by accident,” she said.
A New Yorker raised in Puerto Rico, Ortiz moved to Northern Virginia in 1984. She was working as a hotel security guard in Alexandria when she caught the attention of a local police officer for her tact in speaking with an emotionally disturbed woman in her hotel’s lobby.
“He gave me his card and said, ‘Hey, I think you will be really good doing this type of work,’ which was never in my career path. He basically put the seed in my head,” Ortiz said.
In January 1992, Ortiz joined ACPD’s academy. By the end of that same year, after completing field training, the force called her to translate Spanish for the murder investigation of a 6-year-old child.
“That case opened my eyes to what this real world could be all about, and how there are people out there that could do this kind of damage, even to a child,” Ortiz said. “My role in the investigation as a translator made me understand that investigations is where I wanted to be.”
After spending years fulfilling that goal, Ortiz said she is happy with the legacy she leaves behind.
“Overall, I’m happy that I’m able to walk out of here and go out on my own feet, with my mental health intact, and leaving behind a lot of good resolution for a lot of families,” Ortiz said.
In retirement, she looks forward to stepping away from the stress of the job and having more personal time. She hopes to travel to Spain, France and Thailand.
But Ortiz said she will miss some aspects of the work.
“I’m pretty sure that at some point, I’m going to hear something on the news, and I’m like, ‘I missed those days where I could actually do the job and see the results,'” she said.
While Ortiz will miss the profession after all these years, she said it’s the people she worked with that she will miss the most.
“I’m gonna miss a lot of of the people that I have worked with throughout these 33 years,” she said. “I don’t do it alone. I’ve always had a lot of people that I did depend on and call for to get the job done. This is not a one man show.”
