Twenty-five years later, authorities have finally confirmed the identity of the last known victim of the Los Angeles riots, PEOPLE has learned.

Miguel Armando Quiroz Ortiz’s charred body was found in the rubble inside a Pep Boys in South L.A. on May 2, 1992, four days after mayhem erupted following the acquittal of four L.A. police officers in the vicious beating of black motorist Rodney King.

More than 2,000 people were injured and 50 people died during the five days of looting, rioting and violence. More than 3,000 fires were set and more than 1,000 businesses were destroyed.

Dubbed John Doe #80, the 18-year-old Mexican national’s death is one of the 23 riot-related homicides that have never been solved.

Ortiz died of smoke and soot inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning and thermal burns, and his death was considered a homicide because the fire, which was set between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. on April 30, 1992, was intentionally started, L.A. Police Department cold case detective Luis Rivera tells PEOPLE.

“He was alive when the fire started,” Rivera says. “Whoever set the building on fire, whether he knew it or not, was the person who killed him.”

“It was like random violence,” Rivera adds of the civil unrest. “There was so much going on, I don’t know how they would have been able to solve anything.”

Ortiz was finally identified through fingerprints. “All they had left from him was one middle fingerprint,” Rivera says. “The whole body was charred except for one finger.”

Rivera says that now that police know Ortiz’s identity, they will attempt to track down his killer.

“The biggest lead is we now know who he is,” he says. “This is like a cold case. We didn’t know who he was and now we know, and now we have to work backwards and find people who knew him.”

View photos The scene in L.A. following riots there in 1992 More

View photos The scene at a Pep Boys in L.A. following riots there in 1992 More

Putting a Name to a Face

Ortiz was discovered inside the repair shop at 5801 S. Vermont Ave, about 30 feet from the north entrance. A .38-caliber spent shell casing was discovered under his lower abdomen and appeared to be inside his jeans, according to his autopsy report.

There were signs that the store had been looted before it was torched, Rivera says.

“The body was so badly burned, I don’t know if they can tell if [Ortiz] was shot or not,” he says.

He says he sent the bullet to the lab for ballistic testing — to compare with shell casings at other crime scenes — but there was no match.

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Ortiz used three aliases, including “Armando Ortiz Hernandez,” which made the task of identifying him even more difficult. “He was switching names and sticking an extra name in there,” Rivera says. “When you ran him, it was impossible to find him.”

Ortiz’s body remained at the coroner’s office until he was cremated on July 22, 1992, and buried with other unidentified and unclaimed in an indigent grave in L.A.’s Evergreen Cemetery.

L.A. County Coroner Assistant Chief Ed Winter says they regularly ran Ortiz’s fingerprints through the national database, but he wasn’t identified until they received help from the FBI.

On April 6 of this year, they got a hit. “We knew it was one of our cold cases and we checked every year to see if we came up with something, and we finally did and we wound up getting notification,” Winter tells PEOPLE.

Ortiz’s sister was finally notified of his fate on May 12.

Miguel Armando Quiroz Ortiz More

‘They Were Still Hoping’

Rivera says Ortiz, a native of Oaxaca, Mexico, came to L.A. for job opportunities in the late ’80s. He kept in contact with his family through letters and sent the money he made from his job at a bakery on Florence Avenue — which would be near the center of the rioting when it erupted in 1992 — home to his mother.