A California serial killer appears to be “on a mission” dating back to last year, which saw the fatal shooting of at least six men and the wounding of one woman — but authorities haven’t figured out what’s behind the violence.
Ballistics tests and some video evidence linked the shootings in Stockton and Oakland, about 70 miles apart in northern California, police said.
“We don’t know what the motive is. What we believe is that it is mission-oriented,” the Stockton police chief, Stanley McFadden, said Tuesday. “This person is on a mission.”
Although police would not say whether all seven shootings were linked to the same gun, McFadden alluded to a single handgun during the news conference.
“I have absolutely no answer as to why that pistol sat idle for over 400 days,” between the April 2021 shootings and the first case this summer, the chief said.
Authorities announced last week that five men in the town of Stockton were ambushed and shot alone in the dark over the past few months. Late Monday, police said two more cases last year, the death of a man in Oakland and the nonfatal shooting of a woman in Stockton, were linked to those killings.
A person of interest is being sought in connection with the bloodshed. They appear on video at several of the crime scenes but no evidence links them directly to the shootings, McFadden said. He said some of the victims were homeless and some were not.
There is a $125,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. The police present hundreds of tips every day, and also send additional evidence if other crimes in the state can be connected to the series of shootings.
All of the fatal Stockton cases occurred within a radius of a few square miles between 8 July and 27 September. None of the victims had been robbed or beaten before the killings, and none appeared to know each other, Silva said. The shootings also do not appear to be gang or drug related.
In the other Stockton crime, a 46-year-old woman told investigators she was in her tent on April 16, 2021 around 3:20 a.m. when she heard someone walking outside.
“When she came out of her tent, she ran into somebody holding a gun,” McFadden said.
The suspect fired several shots, injuring the woman, but she tried to defend herself by advancing on her attacker, the chief said. The shooter lowered the gun.
“She said there were no words mentioned at all,” McFadden said.
The woman was also alone at the time
Police said the shooting death of a man in Oakland around 4:15 a.m. on April 10, 2021, was also linked to the violence in Stockton. Juan Vasquez Serrano, 39, was shot multiple times, according to the Alameda County Coroner’s office. It was not immediately clear if the man was also unaccompanied when he was killed.
The city of Stockton, Stockton Crime Stoppers and a local construction company owner have offered a total of $95,000 for information leading to an arrest.
Police have released a grainy still image of a “person of interest,” dressed all in black and wearing a black cap, who has appeared in videos from several of the Stockton homicide crime scenes.
The San Joaquin County medical examiner’s office identified the Stockton victims Monday as Paul Yaw, 35, who was killed July 8; Salvador Debudey Jr, 43, who died August 11; Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, 21, who died on August 30; Juan Cruz, 52, who was killed 21 September; and Lawrence Lopez Sr., 54.
Lopez was shot shortly before 2am on 27 September in a residential area just north of downtown.
He “was just a person who was here in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstance,” his brother, Jerry Lopez, told KXTV-TV. “It’s hard to process that this happened.”
There may even be several people involved in the violence.
“To be honest, we just don’t know,” Silva said. “This person or people who do this, they must be very bold and reckless.”
Police said four of the Stockton homicide victims were walking alone and a fifth was in a parked car when they were killed in the evening or early morning in the city of 320,000 people, about 50 miles (80km) south of the state capital, Sacramento.