Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty in their case against a Stockton man charged with carrying out a series of deadly shootings in Stockton and Oakland.
“We are here today to announce my office’s intent to ask for the harshest penalty possible in the serial killing case,” San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Freitas said Monday during a press conference at the DA’s downtown headquarters. “That is, we are seeking the death penalty for defendant Wesley Brownlee.”
A Stockton resident, Brownlee was arrested around 2 a.m. on Oct. 15, 2022 while driving near Panella Park, on suspicion of carrying out six homicides in Stockton and one in Oakland from 2021-2022.
Later in October 2022, prosecutors charged Brownlee with allegedly carrying out three of the killings. In December, Brownlee was charged for allegedly committing four more homicides, including one in Oakland that Stockton officials hadn’t previously linked to him.
Finally, in November 2025, a grand jury indicted Brownlee on six murder charges, an attempted murder charge and one charge each for possessing a gun and ammunition after having been convicted of felony drug crimes a decade before. The Oakland homicide officials first linked to Brownlee in December 2022 wasn’t included in the indictment, Freitas acknowledged Monday.
Typically, an indictment means prosecutors can skip a case’s preliminary hearing — where a judge decides if there’s enough evidence to proceed to trial — and skip straight to the trial itself.
Earlier on Monday, Judge Xapuri Villapudua was scheduled to set a trial date, consider a request by Brownlee’s lawyer to keep transcripts of the grand jury’s deliberations sealed and to appoint a doctor in the case, according to online case information.
No record of how that proceeding played out was available Monday afternoon, and Brownlee’s public defender, Allison Nobert, didn’t return a request for comment.
Roughly a year and a half ago, Nobert filed a declaration of doubt about Brownlee’s competence to stand trial. In November, the case was put on hold to determine his competence, court records show.
After the November indictment, Freitas said there will be separate trials on the question of Brownlee’s competence, his guilt or innocence and his possible punishment, The Record reported.
Nobert didn’t return a request for comment Monday about prosecutors’ plans to pursue the death penalty. California hasn’t carried out an execution since 2006. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order establishing a moratorium on executions in 2019.
In a memo filed in court in November, Nobert wrote, “We have requests for pre-trial disclosures from the District Attorney’s Office to facilitate litigation into the legality and propriety of the Indictment, including an investigation into Racial Justice Act matters.”
Enacted in 2020, the California law expanded defendants’ ability to gather evidence about whether racial bias impacted their case.
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