Between April 2021 and September 2022 a series of shootings in Oakland and Stockton, California, killed seven men and wounded a woman. Police linked them by ballistics, though they did not say publicly whether one gun was used throughout. In every case the victim was out alone, at night or in the early morning, in a poorly lit place. None was robbed, and police did not believe the shootings were gang-related. The killings frightened Stockton through the summer of 2022 while police searched for a slim man in a dark hooded jacket and a black face mask who they said moved as though he were on a mission.
The first two deaths were in Oakland. On April 10, 2021, a man of about forty was shot dead near Harmon Avenue and 57th Avenue in East Oakland; he has been named in different reports as Miguel Vasquez, Juan Alexander Vasquez and Juan Vazquez Serrano, and his age given as thirty-nine or forty. On April 16 Mervin Harmon, thirty-nine, an Oakland native and a father, was shot dead in Oakland. At 3:20 that same morning in Stockton, at an encampment near Park and Union streets, a man in dark clothes and a face mask pointed a gun at Natasha LaTour, forty-six, from near her tent. She ran at him to defend herself and was shot several times, and she lived.
Then nothing, as far as anyone has said, for more than a year. On July 8, 2022, just after midnight, Paul Yaw, thirty-five, was shot dead in Holiday Park in Stockton. On August 11 at about 9:50 at night Salvador Debudey Jr., forty-three, was shot outside a Popeyes on West Lane. On August 30 at 6:41 in the morning Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, twenty-one, was killed on East Hammer Lane. At 4:27 on the morning of September 21 Juan Carlos Carranza-Cruz, fifty-two, was shot on Manchester Avenue, and at 1:53 on the morning of September 27 Lawrence Lopez Sr., fifty-four, was shot on Porter Avenue. Several of the Stockton men were reported to be homeless.
Stockton and Oakland police worked the case with the FBI, the California Highway Patrol, sheriff's departments and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and a reward of $125,000 was offered. Police released a video of a person of interest. After speculation in the press, Chicago police said they did not believe the shootings were connected to two killings there in 2018.
Wesley Brownlee, a truck driver then aged forty-three, was arrested at about two in the morning on October 15, 2022, at Winslow Way and Village Green Drive in Stockton. A surveillance team had been following him and had concluded from his movements that he was about to attack somebody. He was armed, dressed in dark clothes, with a mask around his neck. The police chief, Stanley McFadden, said officers had caught him "out hunting" and that he was certain they had stopped another killing, and described the person they had been looking for as near perfect, someone who made few mistakes and stayed deliberately in the dark.
Brownlee was born in San Francisco in 1979 and grew up in Oakland. In October 1995, when he was sixteen, his brother Dale, seventeen, was shot dead in what was described as a drug-related shooting, six months after a close friend was stabbed to death, and court records say the loss distressed him badly. In 1997, at eighteen, he was arrested with sixty-seven bindles of crack cocaine and put on probation; in 1998 the probation was revoked after he sold cocaine to an undercover officer, and he served two years in state prison, at San Quentin by court records. The state corrections department lists drug offenses in 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2014 and traffic matters, and nothing resembling the violence alleged here. A relative told a television reporter at the time of his arrest that police had the wrong person.
He was charged first with three murders, of Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, Juan Carlos Carranza-Cruz and Lawrence Lopez, with two firearms counts. On December 27, 2022, an amended complaint added four more murders, the two in Oakland and those of Paul Yaw and Salvador Debudey Jr., and the attempted murder of Natasha LaTour. Stockton police apologized to her before a vigil in October 2022 for having failed to follow up her shooting at the time.
In November 2025, after six weeks of evidence, a San Joaquin County grand jury indicted him on six counts of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder, with special circumstance allegations, firearm enhancements, and counts of possessing a gun and ammunition as a man with felony drug convictions. The District Attorney, Ron Freitas, said prosecutors believed he was responsible for a seventh death as well but were still investigating it and had left it out. Reports of the indictment list the six as Juan Vazquez Serrano, Paul Yaw, Salvador Debudey Jr., Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, Juan Carlos Carranza-Cruz and Lawrence Lopez. Freitas has said he will seek the death penalty if Brownlee is convicted.
The case has still not been tried on those counts. His lawyers, Allison Nobert and John Philipsborn, filed a declaration of doubt about his competence in late 2024, because he has refused to speak to the prosecution, to them, or to the mental health experts appointed to evaluate him. "We have a lack of communication that impairs our representation," his counsel told a hearing in early March 2026. On March 23 Judge Xapuri Villapudua rejected the defense objections, refused to dismiss the case and ordered the grand jury transcripts unsealed. In May the defense said a doctor had found him presently incompetent; the prosecution pressed for a jury to decide.
That jury began hearing the competency case on September 11, 2026. It is not deciding whether he killed anyone, only whether he can be tried. Nobert told the jurors that none of the elements of competence had been shown. The prosecutor, Elton Grau, answered with thirty hours of recorded phone calls Brownlee had made to his mother and brothers from jail over four years, and played two calls to his younger brother, Kevin Rowel, from April 11. Natasha LaTour, the only known survivor, sat in the gallery at a hearing that July and said she believed the case was going in the right direction.
Everything above is an allegation. Six counts of first-degree murder have been returned against Wesley Brownlee by a grand jury and none of them has been tested at trial. No court has convicted him of anything in this case, and he is presumed innocent.