Suspect charged in decades-old Agoura Hills child murder




The Los Angeles County District Attorney filed charges Oct. 22 against a man suspected of murdering a 6-year-old boy in Agoura Hills 29 years ago.

Kenneth Rasmuson, a 53-year-old Idaho man, was believed to have strangled, stabbed and sexually assaulted the boy in 1986. The body of young Miguel Antero was found in a remote Triunfo Canyon creek bed near his Agoura residence, but detectives were unable to bring charges against Rasmuson due to lack of evidence.

Rasmuson, who is also charged in the 1981 death of a 6-year-old boy whose body was found in Pomona, was arrested last week for the death of the Agoura Hills boy when L.A. County Sheriff’s homicide detectives found DNA that linked him to the crime.

In March of this year, Pomona police detectives arrested Rasmuson in Idaho for the first murder. L.A. County detectives learned of his arrest and reexamined the evidence against him in the Agoura Hills cold case.

“A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department senior criminalist, who had performed the laboratory work on the Pomona case, utilized the latest scientific techniques and identified DNA evidence which is said to have scientifically connected Kenneth Rasmuson to be the alleged perpetrator in the sexual assault and murder of Miguel Doe,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement.

Both cases will be tried together, but no decision has been made as to whether the death penalty will be sought, D.A. spokesperson Sarah Ardalani told The Acorn.

Rasmuson is being held without bail. His record also includes a conviction for sodomy with a boy in Santa Barbara County in 1981. He is scheduled to be arraigned for the Agoura Hills murder on Oct. 28 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Pomona.

                                                                                                                                                   –John Loesing



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