A District man was sentenced to 35 years in prison Friday in the 2015 fatal shooting of a Virginia man during morning rush hour on northbound Interstate 295.
A D.C. Superior Court jury in April convicted Oscar Ramos, 34, of first-degree murder in the killing, which prosecutors alleged at trial was part of an elaborate revenge plot in which Ramos believed the victim had been connected to his own father’s slaying in El Salvador years earlier.
End of carouselOn the morning of May 28, 2015, authorities said Pedro Melendez-Alvarado had just emerged from crossing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge when a vehicle pulled up alongside him. Prosecutors said Ramos fired multiple shots toward Melendez-Alvarado near Exit 1 in Southwest Washington, also striking a passenger.
For years, the case remained unsolved, and police believed Melendez-Alvarado may have been shot by an angry motorist during an altercation in traffic, in part because of the account of the surviving victim.
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But in 2017, D.C. homicide detectives learned that Ramos began bragging about his involvement in the shooting on social media and to friends. They began investigating, and found witnesses who claimed that Ramos had targeted Melendez-Alvarado as part of a retaliation plan he orchestrated because — in his telling — Melendez-Alvarado killed his father almost 15 years earlier, when Ramos was 12 and living in El Salvador.
Prosecutors said Ramos, who relocated from El Salvador and lived in various homes in Maryland, Virginia and Massachusetts, created a fake Facebook account posing as a Latina woman and flirted with Melendez-Alvarado to find out his whereabouts.
Ramos was arrested and charged in 2021. He maintained his innocence in court, and his lawyers argued police had arrested the wrong man. At trial, detectives testified there was no evidence that Melendez-Alvarado was linked to Ramos’s father death.
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