Between April 2021 and September 2022 a series of shootings in Stockton and Oakland, California, killed six men and wounded a woman. Police linked them by ballistics, though they did not say publicly whether one gun was used throughout. Most happened at night, in the dark, at close quarters, and the killings frightened Stockton through the summer of 2022 while police searched for a man dressed in black who they said moved as though he were on a mission.
Wesley Brownlee, a truck driver then aged forty-three who had moved to Stockton that summer, was arrested at about two in the morning on October 15, 2022. A surveillance team had been following him and had concluded from his movements that he was about to attack somebody; the police chief, Stanley McFadden, said afterwards that he was certain they had stopped another killing, and described the person they were looking for as near perfect, someone who made few mistakes and stayed deliberately in the dark. Brownlee was armed when he was stopped.
He was charged first with three murders, of Jonathan Rodriguez, twenty-one, Juan Carlos Carranza-Cruz, fifty-two, and Lawrence Lopez, fifty-four, along with two firearms counts. More charges followed, and in 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. 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 of the indictment.
The attempted murder count concerns Natasha LaTour, who was shot in Stockton in April 2021 and survived, and who is the only known survivor of the series. Stockton police apologised to her before a vigil in October 2022 for having failed to follow up the investigation into her shooting at the time.
The case has still not been tried. It stalled for years on the question of whether Brownlee is mentally competent to stand trial, because he has refused to speak to the prosecution, to his own defence lawyers, or to the mental health experts appointed to evaluate him. His counsel told a hearing in March 2026 that the lack of communication impaired their ability to represent him. Later that month a judge rejected the defence objections and ruled the trial could go ahead.
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. A relative told a television reporter at the time of his arrest that police had the wrong person. His earlier criminal record, reported by the California corrections department, consists of drug offences in 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2014 and traffic matters, and nothing resembling the violence alleged here.