Witnesses sensed trouble moments before K Street mass shooting, detective testifies
Witnesses to the downtown Sacramento mass shooting that left six dead and more than a dozen wounded as nightclubs closed on K Street sensed trouble in the moments before the shots were fired.
Jurors at the murder trial for Mtula Payton and Dandrae Martin, the surviving suspects in the April 2022 massacre, continued hearing testimony Friday in Sacramento Superior Court, blocks from the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in the city’s history.
On the witness stand, Sacramento police Det. Shaun McGovern described a hospital interview conducted two days after the April 3 shooting with one of the wounded. The man recalled from his bed at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento an encounter with the man later identified as Smiley Martin — the third suspect in the closing-time shootings.
Martin died in 2024 at Sacramento County Main Jail as he awaited trial in the case.
The witness was walking back from a nearby parking garage to London Club on K Street in the minutes before the shots were fired when he encountered Martin on 10th Street.
“He asked where I was from and what was I looking at?” — questions, the witness said, were intended to determine whether he was affiliated with a gang. He wasn’t, but knew to leave.
Then he saw a weapon, he told McGovern in a video interview played for jurors.
“I saw the gun he had. I said, ‘I’m from the north. I don’t bang,’” the witness said on the video. Martin, clutching a gun in his left hand, pulled the weapon behind his left leg.
“I turn around, take a step, and, gunshots,” the witness said.
He was struck in the leg, the round shattering his femur, he told the investigator. He lay on the sidewalk struggling to breathe. Next to him lay Sergio Harris, 38, and 21-year-old Johntaya Alexander, a bystander.
“She’s down, Sergio’s down, I’m down,” the witness said.
Harris and Alexander were two of the six killed in what Sacramento County prosecutors argue was a gun battle between gang rivals.
Bystanders Yamile Martinez, 21; Alexander, and Melinda Davis, 57, died in the shootings.
Joshua Hoye-Lucchessi, 32; Harris; and Devazia Turner, 29, were involved in the shootout, Sacramento County prosecutors said.
Attorneys for Payton and Martin say their clients were fired upon in a spontaneous burst of violence and shot back in self-defense.
Jurors on Thursday and again on Friday watched security camera footage from various K Street locations showing the Martin brothers, Hoye-Lucchesi and others making their way along K Street in the hour before the shooting.
A witness in a May 2022 telephone interview with McGovern played Thursday for jurors said the group was not dressed for the nightclub. Instead, they wore hooded sweatshirts.
“You feel a bad situation. You feel the tension. It felt uncomfortable. My homies felt uncomfortable,” the witness told McGovern on the May 2022 telephone call. “If you’re not trying to get into the club, what are you trying to do? (Expletive) were trying to kill people where we were just having fun.”
The witness and his girlfriend left K Street before the violence but told McGovern he recognized Hoye-Lucchesi from a television news report.
“I saw him on TV,” the witness told McGovern during the May 2022 telephone call. “’The first thing I said was, ‘It’s that (expletive) fault. It’s that guy’s fault.’”
On Friday, jurors watched as the witness recovering from his wounds at UC Davis Medical Center recalled his own suspicions of the group and his futile attempt to flee the gunfire.
“There’s a group who just wants to stand around and talk to females. Then, there’s a group who wants to stand around and fight. They looked like a mix of both,” the witness told McGovern.
After his run-in with the man on 10th Street, “I’m trying to walk away as fast as I can,” he said. “I step away and, gunshots.”
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