Suspect in Montecito Hit-and-Run Homicide of Wife Apprehended at U.S.–Mexico Border

The suspect in the hit-and-run homicide that left his wife, 32-year-old Oxnard woman Blanca Aguilera, dead on Montecito’s East Mountain Drive last fall has been apprehended.

In a press release Tuesday morning, Santa Barbara County District Attorney John Savrnoch announced that “murder suspect Jose Roberto MunozSanchez, 39, of Oxnard, turned himself in at the U.S.–Mexico border and was subsequently apprehended by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.”

The DA’s Office had filed first-degree murder charges against MunozSanchez last year following the September 29, 2022, death of Aguilera in Montecito. The alleged murder occurred on the secluded 800 block of East Mountain Drive near Cold Spring Trail, where reports of a woman heard screaming in the pre-dawn morning brought Sheriff’s deputies to the area around 5:30 a.m. There, they found the woman, later identified as Aguilera, lying in the roadway with serious injuries and the driver nowhere in sight. Aguilera was transported to the hospital, where she died of her injuries a couple of hours later.

At the time of the incident, the Sheriff’s Office disclosed that “the suspect and the victim were known to each other” and that the attack was not random, but the suspect’s name and the nature of his relationship to the victim had not been made public until today.

MunozSanchez appeared on Monday, October 23, in Santa Barbara Superior Court, where his bail was set at $2 million. The arraignment was continued to October 30.