Ballistics tests have linked the fatal shootings of six men and the wounding of one woman in California — all potentially at the hands of a serial killer — in crimes going back more than a year, police said on Monday.
Authorities last week announced that five men in Stockton had been slain in the past few months, ambushed and shot to death alone in the dark. Late on Monday, police said two additional cases last year — a man’s death in Oakland and the nonfatal shooting of a woman in Stockton — had been tied to those killings.
“It definitely meets the definition of a serial killer,” Stockton Police Public Information Officer Joseph Silva said. “What makes this different is the shooter is just looking for an opportunity, and unfortunately our victims were alone in a dark area.”
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Police would not say whether all seven shootings had been linked to the same gun.
In the fatal Stockton cases, none of the men was robbed or beaten before the killings — which all took place within a radius of a few square kilometers between July 8 and Tuesday last week — and none appeared to have known each other, Silva said, adding that the shootings do not seem to be related to gangs or drugs.
The other Stockton crime — in which a 46-year-old woman was shot but survived her injuries — occurred on April 16 last year at about 3:20am, police said. The woman was also alone at the time.
The shooting death of a 40-year-old man in Oakland has also been connected to the violence, police said. The man was shot to death at about 4:15am on April 10 last year. It was not immediately clear whether the man was also unaccompanied when he was killed.
The Stockton City Government, Stockton Crime Stoppers and a local construction company owner offered a total of US$95,000 for information leading to an arrest in the slayings.
Police released a grainy still image of a “person of interest,” dressed all in black and wearing a black cap, who appeared in videos from several of the homicide crime scenes in Stockton.
The San Joaquin County Office of the Medical Examiner identified the Stockton victims on Monday as Paul Yaw, 35, who was killed on July 8; Salvador Debudey Jr, 43, who died on Aug. 11; Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, 21, who died on Aug. 30; Juan Cruz, 52, who was killed on Sept. 21 and Lawrence Lopez Sr, 54.
Lopez was shot shortly before 2am on Tuesday last week in a residential area just north of downtown.
He “was just a person who was out here at the wrong place, at the wrong time, at the wrong circumstance,” his brother, Jerry Lopez, told KXTV-TV. “It’s hard to process that this has happened.”
There might even be multiple people involved in the violence.
“To be honest, we just don’t know,” Silva said. “This person or people who are out doing this, they are definitely very bold and brazen.”
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