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Bronx man found guilty in 1992 Woodside shoot

By Alex Ginsberg

Nearly 11 years to the day after he helped a gunman shoot a Woodside couple, a Bronx man was convicted of murder and attempted murder in the attack that left the woman dead and the man seriously injured, the Queens district attorney’s office said.

A jury of five women and eight men in State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens deliberated 2 1/2 hours Tuesday before finding Efraim Diaz, 34, of 667 Casanova St. in the Bronx, guilty of assisting an unidentified man shoot Shamir Hurtado and Consuelo Agudelo, the district attorney’s office said.

Diaz faces 37 1/2 years to life in prison when Judge Richard Buchter sentences him on July 28, the district attorney’s office said.

According to trial testimony, Diaz entered Hurtado’s Woodside home on July 2, 1992 under the pretext of paying for a drug delivery. Then an accomplice forced his way in and ordered Hurtado and Agudelo to lie down on the bed. A struggle ensued, during which Agudelo was shot once in the head and killed, and Hurtado — who survived — was hit twice in the neck and once in the back.

Hurtado testified that before the two left him for dead, Diaz told the unidentified triggerman, “You have to kill him. You can’t leave him alive.”

The case remained unsolved until Hurtado, now 43, spoke with detectives from the NYPD cold case squad and identified the man who ordered him killed.

The gunman remains at large.