One week after gunmen fired into a child’s birthday party in north Stockton, investigators have revealed little about the suspects or a possible motive.
But as the community grapples with what could’ve caused such shocking violence, residents and officials alike have raised questions about whether gang conflict played a role.
The shooting at an event venue near Thornton Road last Saturday left four dead, including three children, and at least 13 wounded.
As San Joaquin County sheriff’s investigators worked to find the shooters in the following days, the department said the attack was likely “targeted,” but repeatedly stated they could not confirm if gangs were involved. Meanwhile, other officials have contradicted one another in their public statements, with District Attorney Ron Freitas describing the shooting to reporters as “gang gun violence” and Stockton Mayor Christina Fugazi making, then walking back, a similar claim.
Despite “a lot of arrows pointing” to a possible gang connection, the county’s former top prosecutor said investigators’ silence on the question itself fits into law enforcement’s typical strategy for going after gangs.
“They don’t want to escalate the fight, if it is gang-related,” Tori Verber Salazar, who served as the San Joaquin County district attorney for eight years, told Stocktonia by phone Friday. “If you came out and said, ‘It’s a gang fight between this and that,’ you know, it’s free game.”
The unanswered questions about the latest shooting parallel the complexity in understanding the true scope of gang violence in Stockton — and its solutions. The region has a history of gang influence that investigative agencies, social services and government programs have yet to resolve.
Although Saturday’s shooting happened just outside the city limits, the city would not make its experts on the dynamics of violence in Stockton available for interviews, or clarify why online crime analyses formerly available to the public have gone missing.
If gang members did carry out Saturday’s attack, Verber Salazar stressed that the killing of young children would mark a stark break from types of gang violence she saw throughout her career as a prosecutor.
Typically, if kids are present, “nobody shoots it up,” she said.
Even if the specifics of last week’s case remain unclear, many in Stockton see gang issues as a central, enduring challenge in the city.
“Law enforcement makes announcements about the crimes and investigations,” said former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs. “But with that being said, we’re also not dumb. We also recognize that Stockton has had a history of gangs. … Regardless of this particular tragedy, we know we always have to be mindful of doing the work to interrupt gang violence in Stockton.”
‘Babies falling to the ground’: Family describes scene of shooting
Measuring a gang presence
Whether or not Saturday’s shooting had any gang connection, the presence of gangs looms large in Stockton.
Since the attack, Fugazi has repeatedly said there are 100 gangs and about 5,000 gang members in the city.
As of this year, there are 86 documented gangs and about 2,700 gang members, a spokesperson for the Stockton Police Department told Stocktonia earlier this week. Other city crime data attempts to map specific gang territory and tallies a far smaller number of gangs.
When asked how the department defines “gangs,” Stockton police spokesperson Omer Edhah said they include three or more people “engaging in similar behavior, similar clothing, hanging out in similar areas” and involved in criminal activity.
That definition tracks with California’s legal framework for gang activity. According to state law, a gang is any organized group of three or more people who have a name or identifier, and who “collectively engage in, or have engaged in, a pattern of criminal gang activity.”
Those crimes could include any from a long list in state law — from homicides, kidnappings and rape to more moderate lawbreaking, such as making threats and carrying a concealed gun without a permit.
And while Stockton has a reputation for crime — which violence like last weekend’s mass shooting only seems to bolster — in fact, gang members involved in deadly violence are relatively few. The number of gang members most at risk of being fatally shot make up less than 1% of Stockton’s population, criminologists say.
Embed codeOverall, there have been 34 killings in the city this year, police said — not including Saturday’s deaths, which happened in an unincorporated pocket of Stockton under the Sheriff’s Office’s jurisdiction.
In the wake of the massacre, peacekeepers with the city’s Office of Violence Prevention haven’t spoken publicly. When Stocktonia sought to interview a representative of the office about the factors driving Stockton’s cyclical violence, a city official redirected the interview requests to the mayor.
And some public crime data formerly maintained by the Stockton city manager’s office remains unavailable.
Charts tracking the city’s performance in multiple areas, including crime reduction, weren’t available as of this week through Stockton’s Open Data Portal, once run by the now-disbanded Office of Performance and Data Analytics. According to the portal, the data underlying those insights hasn’t been updated since February.
In spring, the data office was replaced by the Office of Public Transparency, Information and Communication, also known as OPTIC.
In an interview with Stocktonia, the head of OPTIC, city spokesman Tony Mannor, said he didn’t know whether the city planned to continue maintaining the data portal. He did not immediately respond to written questions seeking further details.
Despite claims of greater transparency, the department continues to decline to answer questions about its origin and operations.
The loss of the data office is just part of a larger wave of upheaval that has roiled city government since January, when the City Council ousted its longtime city manager, Harry Black.
That upset included the firing and departure of multiple department leaders, the resignation of Stockton’s financial watchdog and controversial spending by the former interim city manager, who remains at the center of multiple investigations.
Disruption from the norm
If gang members were behind last weekend’s mass shooting, it would represent a startling disruption in Stockton’s typical gang dynamics for one central reason, Verber Salazar said.
“You can’t get authorization to take out children. (That) has always been the rule,” according to the former DA.
Three of the dead were kids: 14-year-old Amari Peterson, and 8-year-old cousins Maya Lupian and Journey Rose Guerrero. The fourth victim, Susano Archuleta, was 21.
Verber Salazar prosecuted gang cases for 35 years, she said. And in her experience, gangs have traditionally maintained that children under roughly age 14 are “off-limits.”
That could explain why parents and other partygoers may have felt safe attending the birthday bash celebrating a 2-year-old, despite the fact that “several gang members” were among the guests, according to court papers parole officials filed this week.
“If you’re in a gang, and you’re in the park, and you’re wearing your colors, and you’re in a family party, you have the confidence of knowing that this is not a time when somebody would come by and shoot,” Verber Salazar said. “But not anymore.”
In addressing the media this week, members of the family who hosted the party were adamant that the violence didn’t reflect gang conduct.
“I can say that it was not a gang war. It was kids,” Berniece Bass, the birthday girl’s great-aunt, told reporters. “You lost your stripes. If you thought you was a gangster, they’re gone.”
If investigators know who the intended targets were of Saturday’s gunfire, they aren’t saying. But generally, if a gang is targeting someone high-profile, senior gang members must “authorize” the killing “because it’s going to bring a huge spotlight onto gangs” in the area, Verber Salazar said.
Even if the mass shooting had a gang link, one reason investigators might withhold that information could be to eliminate more individual motives first, the former DA said. Detectives must figure out “whether or not this was an isolated situation, where they are targeting an individual over a personal rift,” she said.
But investigators’ relative silence isn’t the only clue it could be a gang case. According to Verber Salazar, police sometimes try to intercept further violence after a gang shooting by arresting possible participants for past violations.
On Monday, two relatives of the 2-year-old who was at the center of the birthday party were arrested by state officers on allegations of violating their parole by being in contact with gang members. The two also had relatives wounded and killed in the attack. They haven’t been implicated as participating in the shooting.
“You’re going to pick people up. You’re going to arrest people that might be a secondary, maybe not a primary (person), but a secondary,” Verber Salazar said. “Those are going to escalate situations. So, you’re going to try to mitigate that.”
While in custody, investigators also could attempt to interview them about the crime.
A longer dynamic
Some Stockton gang dynamics trace their roots back to the 1970s and ’80s, Verber Salazar said. That’s when Sacramento politics and cheaper land prices led the state to build lots of prisons in Northern California, she said. Deuel Vocational Institution outside Tracy became notorious for gang-related violence, she said.
When people joined local communities after leaving DVI on parole, those dynamics were introduced into the area, she said.
“We were behind the curve on it,” Verber Salazar said of law enforcement officials.
“And we’ve been chasing it ever since.”
At the same time, the social problems that push people toward violence run as deep as the historical roots of gang dynamics in the area.
“When you have educational challenges and poverty, there’s always going to be perpetual gun violence,” said Nuri Muhammad, the local former program manager of Advance Peace, a nationwide group focused on ending cyclical violence. The organization operated in Stockton until March, when it closed because of a lack of funding, he said.
Young Stocktonians at risk of enduring or committing violence are also suffering from a lack of mentors who could influence them to think through their impulses, he said. That includes young local rappers, whose music can reflect what’s happening on the streets, he added.
Yet with street organizations, “whenever there’s a large law sweep, those (older people) are the people that are caught up in those sweeps,” Muhammad said. “It produces a vacuum in leadership. And somebody’s going to come behind them, less mature, and stand in that gap.”
In Verber Salazar’s experience, youth can introduce an element of chaos into gang violence.
“Where you have a tricky group is when you have youngsters, if you will, who want to prove themselves,” she said.
When violence breaks out, some may feel desperate for retaliation. While there’s no public evidence that the dynamics Verber Salazar or Muhammad described led to the mass shooting, the people who were at the party “are very, very traumatized,” the former DA said.
“(If) somebody shot at my kids, I’ve got to say, I probably wouldn’t have the best logical reasoning going on,” Verber Salazar said. That’s why “we want to talk with them. So that we can work it through with them, that there’s a better way to do it.”
Stocktonia Editor Scott Linesburgh contributed to this report.
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