The 14-year-old boy arrived at a San Joaquin County hospital on Sept. 21, mortally wounded from a gunshot wound.
It took almost a month, but Stockton police detectives tracked down and arrested the man they determined was responsible for the teen’s death. With the help of the U.S. Marshal’s Service task force, Stockton authorities took Anthony Young, 50, of Manteca into custody on suspicion of murder in the death of JonDavid Castleman.
For Stockton detectives, the arrest was another victory in the fight to solve as many homicides as possible. In police lingo, those solutions are known as the “clearance rate.” In Stockton, a case becomes cleared once a homicide suspect is arrested and booked into the county jail.
Based on that definition, Stockton’s police detective squad has a clearance rate of 57% for the 42 homicides recorded in the city through Nov. 7, said Officer David Scott, a department spokesman.
But is that rate considered good?
As it turns out, yes. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit crime think tank, found that the national homicide solution rate was 52% as of 2022.
“Overall, I would say that Stockton’s 57% clearance rate is promising,” said Blake Randol, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Cal State Stanislaus. “They’re doing fairly well.”
And while there are six weeks left in the year and slayings in the city have ticked up lately — on Nov. 9, a man and a woman were killed in separate shootings in Stockton — police are encouraged by the number of cleared cases.
Even with the new homicides, the solve rate has remained unchanged between Sept. 30 — the end of the third quarter — and last week, said Officer David Scott, a department spokesman. And the 57% figure is a vast improvement over 2023’s clearance rate of 41% during the first three quarters of the year.
Although the department is proud of its progress, detectives “understand the work is not finished and we will continue to work around the clock to continue the mission of making an arrest on a homicide case from 2024 or years past,” Scott said in a statement.
Solving a homicide is not always easy, he noted. It can take days, weeks or months to identify a suspect, make an arrest and then uncover the evidence that will lead to a conviction.
Plus, there’s a wide divergence in the types of homicides, making some easier to solve than others. For instance, of the cases that Scott said he was allowed to discuss, seven were labeled domestic-related, three involved robberies and drug dealing and two were connected to people living in encampments.
Clearance rates for homicides arising from domestic strife can be easier to solve because by and large, the most obvious suspects — present or former spouses or lovers, or family members — are known to the victim, according to Randol.
“One of the the leading causes of … homicide death for women is to be murdered by a spouse or former lover,” he said.
But, he added, homicides motivated by money and narcotics “tend to have lower clearance rates because oftentimes the suspect is not necessarily known” to the victim. Even if they are, it may be a more casual relationship that makes it harder to identify them as the perpetrator.
With a rise in the narcotics trade, which can be deadly, the homicide clearance rate has dramatically fallen. A study published earlier this year in the Annual Review of Criminology found that the homicide clearance rate had fallen nationally from 93% in 1962 to 64% in 1994.
Today, a national clearance rate hovering around 50% means for every killer brought to justice, another remains free. Randol pointed out, however, that the advent of crime-solving advances such as DNA testing show promise in cutting the “unacceptably high” number of suspects still on the loose.
Dogged investigative work pays off in cases like Castleman’s. After officers were called to the hospital where the boy was admitted, it was determined he had been shot near Carolyn Weston Boulevard and Manthey Road, and from there, detectives tracked down a suspect, later identified as Young. The Manteca man was scheduled to be arraigned Oct. 31, but the district attorney’s office did not have information as of Friday on where the case stands.
Police have not disclosed what prompted the shooting, but neighbors have offered kind words on social media for the victim.
In condolences offered in a posting on Legacy.com, one acquaintance described Castleman as “a kid who always was smiling and the most respectful young man,” with “a mature mindset for a 14-year-old boy.”
Another addressed his memory directly.
“I’m so sorry, JonDavid,” it was penned. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.”