‘Are you looking for me?’ Jury convicts suspect Oakland clown-costumed killer

OAKLAND — An Alameda County jury has convicted a local resident of one of the city’s most eerie murders in recent memory, a case largely based on DNA evidence found in the killer’s clown mask.

Jesus Perez-Munoz, 55, was found guilty of second-degree murder, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and having a sawed-off shotgun in his RV when police came to arrest him a month after the July 2024 killing. Jurors acquitted him of first-degree murder, court records show.

Eyewitness accounts of the July 25, 2024, killing paint a chilling picture; the victim, Ivan Ortegon-Couoh, 41, was easy to find because he lived in a tiny home on the railroad tracks between 66th and 50th avenues in Oakland, near the Coliseum. Others in the area say that around 10:20 p.m., a man silently crept up the tracks, dressed in a white jumpsuit and a clown mask, then approached Ortegon-Couoh.

“Are you looking for something?” Ortegon-Couoh asked. The clown nodded his head up and down.

“Are you looking for me?” Ortegon-Couoh offered. That’s when prosecutors say “the clown lifted a gun and shot twice,” then walked off into the night.

As Ortegon-Couoh lay dying from gunshot wounds, the people around him offered no assistance, according to eyewitness accounts.

“I said, ‘Let’s go. This is not our business,’” one man who saw the shooting later testified. “I went away.”

By the time police got there, Ortegon-Couoh appeared to have been run over by a train, investigators said in court records. What followed was a painstaking process of tracking down and re-interviewing eyewitnesses who were mostly homeless, including one man who has repeatedly inserted himself into homicide investigations, often offering up disputed information.

The break in the case came when police found the clown mask behind a short wall along the train tracks and tested it for DNA. That led to the identification of Perez-Munoz, whose cells were found in the chin of the mask, according to court records.

Police raided Perez-Munoz’s RV, parked on 54th Avenue, on Aug. 21, 2024. There they found the suspected murder weapon, two other guns — including a sawed-off shotgun — and more than 100 live bullets, authorities said in court filings. They also allegedly found a methamphetamine pipe and fake IDs.

Police also tested the DNA against a man whose name they received from a 31-year-old Oakland resident who has repeatedly offered disputed information in homicide investigations over the last two years. The DNA test cleared that suspect, according to prosecutors.

In the 2025 killing of Kody Johnston in Oakland, the 31-year-old man claimed the suspect killer, Juan Montiel, had confessed in a recorded jail call, but police were unable to verify the claim. Johnston’s significant other told police that she believed the 31-year-old man, who she knew as “Killa,” had hired Montiel to kill Johnston. Later, the same man told authorities a man named “Droopy” was responsible for the double homicide of brothers Nathanuel and Jason Willis , though another man has been arrested and charged in that killing, according to court records.

Last May, the 31-year-old was arrested for allegedly evading police in a stolen car and dragging a 76-year-old man with his car during the chase.

After Perez-Munoz was arrested and charged in August 2024, police and defense investigators had to try and track down eyewitnesses who live in homeless encampments and ramshackle cabins around Oakland. One of them was found along the tracks near where Ortega-Couoh was killed, sleeping in a tarp next to a large graffiti painting that read “ThxForNada,” according to court records.

Another man, who testified for prosecutors at the preliminary hearing, said that Ortega-Couoh had a violent reputation. He was known for throwing rocks or swinging blunt objects when he got upset, the witness said. Several witnesses told police that he and Perez-Munoz had a dispute over allegedly stolen property in the summer of 2024.