Sacramento mass shooting trial begins. Jurors to decide, shootout or self-defense?
Prosecutors showed video of the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the worst mass shooting in Sacramento history. Images of hundreds fleeing the roar of gunfire punctuated the desperate scene. At its center, prosecutors said, two groups of men, longtime rivals who met on the corner of 10th and K streets.
The shooting was not an act of self-defense, prosecutors said as trial in the K Street mass shootings began Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court. Instead, prosecutors said, a shootout between longtime gang rivals left six dead including three bystanders in the chaotic minutes after closing tine, April 3, 2022.
“It’s a standoff at 10th and K streets. Guns are drawn. Lines are drawn,” Sacramento County deputy district attorney Brad Ng told jurors.
Trial takes place in downtown Sacramento just blocks from the carnage. Dandrae Martin and Mtula Payton, the two surviving suspects in the killings, each face three counts of murder.
Bystanders Yamile Martinez, 21; Johntaya Alexander, 21; and Melinda Davis, 57, died in the shootings. Families and friends of the victims sat in the rows behind Martin and Payton.
The three others slain in the gunfire early April 3, 2022, Joshua Hoye-Lucchessi, 32; Sergio Harris, 38; and Devazia Turner, 29, were involved in the shootout, Sacramento County prosecutors said.
Ng showed video of Smiley Martin and others on Marconi Avenue boasting hours before the shooting started, and prosecutors said these boasts led to the fatal standoff. Martin, brother Deandre Martin and Lucchessi, shot dead in the gunfire, were looking for a confrontation, Ng said. Defense attorneys later dismissed the video as “posturing,” rather than sparking the shootout.
They would find the confrontation on 10th Street, hanging out for several hours until the shootout at closing time. In the minutes before the shooting, Ng told jurors, Smiley Martin walked the short block back to J Street and pulled a gun from his car — an illegally modified, fully automatic Glock pistol — before returning to the 10th Street corner.
“That confrontation led to the deaths of three men and three people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Ng said. “It’s a standoff over gang problems, gang issues.”
But defense attorneys Reed Kingsbury and Linda Parisi dismissed Ng’s account as a too-tidy narrative for the chaos that erupted when the shooting started. Kingsbury derided the district attorney’s theory as a “simplistic yarn about a more complicated, complex scene.”
Smiley Martin and Hoye, depicted as rivals by prosecutors, greeted each other; Martin embraced Payton at one point before the shooting. The two grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same elementary school, Kingsbury said. When the shooting started, Payton was leaning against the wall of a jewelry store at 10th and K. The shots he fired, Kingsbury said, were panicked attempts to defend himself. Kingsbury said Payton’s shots were not fatal.
“He knows only that shots are being fired at him,” Kingsbury said. “He ran for his life.”
“There is no O.K. Corral going on around here,” said Parisi in the afternoon. Both attorneys said Sergio Harris, shot dead in the barrage, was the catalyst for what was to come, firing the first shots that sent hundreds running.
“Sergio Harris was a very violent man; a man with a very quick temper who ignited this whole event,” Parisi said. “There was gunfire coming from all kinds of directions. The evidence will show that chaos erupted. It didn’t happen in slow-motion. The law does not criminalize fear. In that wildly chaotic circumstance, people are entitled to defend themselves.”
Trial continues Wednesday before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael G. Bowman.
.JPG)