Pink jacket, bloody body: At Sacramento mass shooting trial, officers recount the chaos
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Officers testified about a pink jacket and green purse found near a slain bystander.
- Prosecutors said 114 spent bullet casings were recovered at the downtown shooting scene.
- Two men face three murder counts each in the April 2022 shooting.
Police officers responding to a late-night downtown gunfight that became the deadliest mass shooting in Sacramento history described the aftermath in court on Tuesday: A pink jacket and green purse that lay near the body of a slain bystander; blood on the belly button of a man later accused of murder; 114 spent bullet casings.
Their testimony came as prosecutors continued to build their case in the ongoing murder trial of two men accused of participating in the April 2022 shooting.
Mtula Payton, 31, and Dandrae Martin, 30, said by prosecutors to have been on opposite sides of the fight at 10th and K Streets, each face three counts of murder. Smiley Martin, Dandrae Martin’s brother, was also accused of murder in the case, but he died in jail awaiting trial from what authorities said was a drug overdose.
Among the dead in the violence that broke out just as the bars were closing on that cool spring night were Joshua Hoye-Lucchessi, 32; Sergio Harris, 38; and Devazia Turner, 29 — all believed to have been participants in the gunfight. Three more people who were killed — Yamile Martinez, 21; Johntaya Alexander, 21; and Melinda Davis, 57 — were bystanders.
On Tuesday, prosecutors Brad Ng and Megan Eixenberger led officers responding to the scene to recount what they found.
Hostile crowd
Officer Kate Haden described finding Turner, who was still alive but barely had a pulse. She tried to administer medical aid, but his pulse stopped.
She and other officers arrived to find the crowd uncooperative and hostile, she said under questioning from Eixenberger and defense attorney Reid Kingsbury, who represents Payton.
The police needed about two hours to move the crowd away from the crime scene, she and other officers testified. The officers did not say why the crowd seemed hostile to police, but did not disagree when one of the attorneys suggested that people streaming from the bars into gunfire that night may have mistakenly thought that law enforcement started the shooting.
Kingsbury and defense lawyer Linda Parisi, who represents Dandrae Martin, stressed the chaotic nature of the scene and the uncooperative crowd.
Key to their strategy, Parisi said in an earlier interview with The Bee, is to persuade the eight female and four male jurors that Martin and Payton were acting in self-defense when they began shooting. Their case hinges on a centuries-old legal doctrine that comes out of the days of dueling, which says that people who agree to fight cannot later claim that they acted in self-defense if they harm someone.
Prosecutors have characterized the gunfight as a planned and quickly escalating confrontation between rival gang members, but Parisi and Kingsbury said it erupted spontaneously amid the chaos of the evening.
Under questioning from Parisi, Haden said that about 75 to 100 bystanders were still inside the crime scene as officers worked to move them away and seal it off.
“You do not know whether people are picking up items that could be evidence, correct?” she asked the next officer on the stand, Adrian Silva. “They could be picking up weapons? Picking up ammunition?”
What the videos show
Eixenberger showed video from Silva’s body-worn camera. It showed him running through the scene, asking people if they’ve been hit. Someone comes up to him and tells him there’s a body.
Eixenberger stopped the video at the body of Melinda Davis, an unhoused woman who lived on the streets downtown. She lies sprawled on the ground, a bundle of belongings nearby and a red baseball cap on her head. Nearby, a different video shows her pink jacket crumpled on the sidewalk and a green purse.
Sgt. Ashley Schiele, a training officer who raced to the scene that night with a new recruit, said she arrived at about 2:05 a.m., just after the shooting stopped.
Her body-cam records the sound of her shoes striking the sidewalk as she walks quickly through the scene.
“There’s a couple of guns over there,” someone tells her. The camera shows what Ng says is a Glock 19 pistol that shoots 9 mm rounds. He said that most of the bullets fired that night were 9 mm.
Schiele is shown on the video finding Smiley Martin, who lies on the ground, face up. She lifts his shirt, showing a red stain near his belly button. She testified that she tried to wipe it away, but it came back.
Smiley Martin was wounded in the chest, arm, back, shoulder and belly-button, she said under questioning from Parisi and Ng, although the injuries may not have all been from separate gunshot wounds.
ER busy with victims
Not far from the downtown scene near the former location of Sharif Jewelers where the shooting took place, the emergency department at Sutter Medical Center in midtown was busy with gunshot victims, said Officer Amber Hickey, who was assigned that night to the Sacramento Police Department’s detail there.
Among the patients who came in that night was Dandrae Martin, who also had been shot. Hickey said he was “calm and collected.” He was not forthcoming with information, she said.
A woman was brought in with a gunshot wound to her back, Hickey testified. Ng asked her if she recalled the woman saying she had seen “a lot of guys walking around with their hands in their pockets.”
“I should have walked away right then,” the woman said, according to Ng. “But I wanted a hot dog.”
