Raleigh cold case arrest made in 2019 park killing

Raleigh police have made a long-awaited arrest in the 2019 killing of Jorge Zelaya, saying retested evidence finally linked the case to Roger Riddick, 49. Zelaya was 24 when he was found dead with stab wounds in the parking lot of Brentwood Park Community Center in Northeast Raleigh, a death that left his family waiting nearly seven years for a break.

Officers first responded on June 6, 2019, to 3315 Vinson Court after a deceased person was found in a nearby park. Investigators said Zelaya had been stabbed, and detectives interviewed people in the area and others connected to him, but they could not identify a suspect at the time. Police also said they were unsure how long Zelaya’s body had been in the lot before it was discovered, a detail that underscored how narrow the early window for witnesses and physical evidence may have been.

The case moved again on February 25, 2026, when Raleigh detectives reviewed evidence collected in the original investigation and sent it to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory for additional testing using technology that was not available in 2019. On May 6, 2026, investigators received a positive match tying the evidence to Riddick. The case was then presented to the Wake County District Attorney’s Office, and charges were approved before Riddick was arrested on May 21, 2026, and processed at the Wake County Detention Center.

For Zelaya’s family, the killing never disappeared from view. In June 2019, his mother, Lesly Zelaya Blanco, described her grief as an “immense pain,” and neighbors told reporters the area could feel dangerous at night. One person who found the body initially thought it might have been an overdose or a homeless person lying in the lot, a grim sign of how quickly the scene had been absorbed into the ordinary traffic of the park before the homicide investigation took shape.

The arrest also highlights how cold cases can reawaken when older evidence is reexamined with newer tools. Raleigh police said the Homicide Unit, which handles homicides, deceased persons, suicides and suspicious deaths, includes one captain, one lieutenant, 10 detectives and two sergeants. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation’s Cold Case Investigation Team, founded in 2020, assists with unresolved homicides, missing persons and unidentified individuals, the kind of work that can turn a quiet file back into an active murder case.