People rewatching classic episodes of America’s Most Wanted don’t expect that one of its cold cases would be solved by them. But one man was surprised when he thought he recognized a suspect from an unresolved hit-and-run incident on the program. And as fate would have it, the suspect happened to be his neighbor. His tip to law enforcement would eventually solve a homicide case that had gone cold for nearly three decades.
Investigators had exhausted all leads to the suspect’s whereabouts
On September 29, 1997, 64-year-old Leslie Ruby passed away outside his home due to vehicular homicide by a hit-and-run driver, 28-year-old Gerardo Garcia-Michel, according to a video posted by the Des Moines Police on its official Facebook page.
The video describes Leslie as a retiree, a veteran of the Korean War, and a beloved figure in his community for being a loving family man. His only grandchild, Shonna, said in an interview that she had a special bond with him and that was raised by Leslie as a father figure since her actual dad was missing in her life.
On one fateful day, Leslie had finished mowing the grass at his daughter and granddaughter’s house. He was driving the mower back to his home and crossed the street when he was struck by a car, which drove off without stopping to help.
“My grandma heard the crash and went outside, ’cause she was home,” Shonna recalled. “So she saw.”
Investigators initially had trouble tracking the driver down since witnesses didn’t get a good look at him, but many said the car was a dark-colored vehicle similar to a Cadillac and that it had no license plate. Fortunately, the case broke when an officer saw a dark-colored sedan parked on the west side of town that had front-end damage and a cracked windshield, leading detectives to discover the name of the driver. However, by then Garcia-Michel had already fled the state and the trail went cold.
America’s Most Wanted profiled the case a year later in 1998. That episode resulted in many tips and leads, but none of them panned out.
Man recognizes hit-and-run driver as his neighbor
Now fast forward almost 29 years later. On August 4, 2026, an unnamed man in New Jersey was watching a rerun of that episode with Leslie’s case when he realized that his neighbor was indeed Gerardo Garcia-Michel.
The man had sent in a Crime Stoppers tip with photographs of his neighbor. Police looked at the evidence and saw that Garcia-Michel had “certainly aged” after being on the run for that long, and upon comparing the photographs to images of the suspect, they were “pretty confident” that they had a hit.
They were particularly surprised that the suspect had settled nowhere close to Southern California, where some of his family resided, and had fled to the opposite side of the continent. Des Moines Police promptly re-opened the case and reached out to law enforcement in New Jersey.
Shonna was astounded that there was movement on her grandfather’s homicide after all these years. “My husband, he had the day off, and he comes into where I’m working,” she said, “and he’s like, um, ‘There’s a detective here about your grandpa’s case.’ And I don’t know if I felt like I was dreaming or I was in shock.”
The video notes that, on August 26, the United States Marshals were able to take Garcia-Michel into custody and confirmed that the suspect was the person the police were looking for. One reason it took so long for law enforcement to locate him was because he had made minor changes to his name and date of birth.
Des Moines Police says it is determined to pursue the case through and is still continuing the process of getting a governor’s warrant to extradite Gracia-Michel from New Jersey to Iowa.
