K Street shooting defendant Payton takes stand, recounts deadly 2022 shootout
Mtula Payton sprinted down 10th Street toward J Street and his parked car, firing behind him as he ran. He didn’t know who he was shooting or where the gunshots were coming from, he said.
“Everybody was running in the same direction as me. People were getting shot around me. I was scared,” Payton told his attorney Reed Kingsbury from the witness stand.
“Of what?” Kingsbury asked.
“Dying,” said Payton.
Seconds later, six people were dead. Another 13 people were wounded on downtown Sacramento’s K Street and 10th Street, in what became the deadliest mass shooting in the city’s history. Payton testified Thursday at his murder trial in Sacramento Superior Court, just blocks from the April 3, 2022, massacre.
Payton testified for hours Thursday before jurors and Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman and will return Monday to the witness stand.
Self-defense or gang-rival shootout?
For weeks at trial, attorneys for Payton and Dandrae Martin, the sole surviving suspects in the April 2022 shootings, have argued the Sacramento men were defending themselves from a sudden burst of gunfire at closing time.
Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office prosecutors argued Payton and Martin, both with alleged deep ties to Sacramento street gangs, traded gunfire in a shootout with gang rivals with deadly consequences.
Payton spoke unapologetically from the witness stand about his gang ties and his criminal history. Stints in and out of, first, juvenile hall, then county jail, and ultimately, prison on firearm possession charges.
He is a member of the 29th Street Crips, as was his father. (”I was born into it,” he said at one point. “I’m a Crip. My clique is Gutta,” he said later, referring to the south Sacramento gang offshoot).
He testified to his close friendships with Davazia Turner, one of three suspected shooters shot dead early April 3; and Smiley Martin, brother of co-defendant Dandrae Martin. Smiley Martin died in 2024 in Sacramento County Main Jail awaiting trial in the massacre.
Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchessi, 32; and Turner, 29, were involved in the shootout that killed them, Sacramento County prosecutors said.
Both Turner and Smiley Martin were “like brothers” to Payton, friends since their south Sacramento childhoods, roaming Sacramento streets and sharing stints in juvenile hall.
Payton did not know Sergio Harris as well. Harris was closer to Turner, he testified.
But Payton knew Harris “was not somebody to cross.”
Defense attorneys Kingsbury and Martin attorney Linda Parisi say Harris fired the first shots that triggered the violence before he himself was shot dead.
The downtown hours before the shooting were typically bustling. Clubgoers crowded K Street and nightclubs London Club and El Santo and District 30, where Payton and Turner landed in the minutes before the shooting.
But one witness, wounded in the shooting, told police that the groups including Payton, Turner, Harris, the Martins and Joshua Hoye-Lucchessi, who was also killed in the shooting, weren’t dressed for the clubs, but for trouble, in hooded sweatshirts.
“You feel a bad situation. You feel the tension,” the witness said in the 2022 police interview played for jurors earlier at trial.
Has anybody seen anybody with a gun?’
The night had been a reunion of sorts. Smiley Martin had just finished a stretch at High Desert State Prison in Susanville and was back in Sacramento. Payton hadn’t seen his friend in five years. He hadn’t seen other hangers-on since their days in juvenile hall, he testified, telling attorney Kingsbury he had “no concerns” about the group.
Still, 20 minutes before the shooting started, Payton walked back to his car parked at 10th and J to pick up his Glock 19 handgun, loaded with an 18-round clip.
He always carried a gun, he said, to “feel safe,” though he testified he had never shot anyone. He tucked the Glock into his hoodie.
“Easy access,” he told jurors.
Payton said he returned to 10th and K streets at 1:56 a.m., four minutes before the shootings, as video of the fateful moments played in the courtroom. People had already begun to scatter seconds later, the video showed.
“Somebody yelled out that somebody got a gun,” Payton said. “I’m trying to find out who’s around me.”
Payton said he did not make any plans to target anyone, instead assessing the scene.
“Who has a gun? Has anybody seen anybody with a gun?” he said. Payton said he wasn’t concerned about another group.
“My focus was on my safety,” he said.
He said he saw Hoye and a woman arguing at 10th and K, before telling Hoye to “be cool.” He said Hoye shoved the woman away. Then came gunshots and the chaos that followed. It was 2 a.m.
Hoye, Harris and Payton’s friend Turner lay dead. Three bystanders, Yamile Martinez, 21; Johntaya Alexander, 21; and Melinda Davis, 57, also died, unable to escape the sudden barrage of bullets. More than a dozen others lay wounded as the downtown block descended into chaos.
Payton and a friend, both wounded, managed to climb back into Payton’s car on J Street and speed away.
“I got in the car and took off,” he told Kingsbury. Kingsbury asked what Payton was thinking at that moment.
“I was thinking ‘What the (expletive) just happened?’” Payton said.
Testimony resumes Monday in Sacramento Superior Court.
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