3 convicted of murder in shooting of CVS manager killed at his Carmichael home
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- A jury convicted Jeannette Lucille Nunes, Michael Anthony Espinosa and Miguel Esquibel.
- Prosecutors said they conspired to kill Vitaliy Zaytsev to collect his life insurance.
- Nunes, Espinosa and Equibel were found guilty of first-degree murder in Zaytsev’s death.
A woman, her son and his friend were convicted of murder in the 2024 shooting death of a CVS manager who was killed outside his Carmichael home in what Sacramento County prosecutors said was a conspiracy to collect proceeds from his life insurance policy.
A jury on Thursday found Jeannette Lucille Nunes, 59, her son Michael Anthony Espinosa, 42, and his friend Miguel Esquibel, 38, guilty of the first-degree murder for the death of 41-year-old Vitaliy Zaytsev, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office announced Friday in a news release.
Espinosa also was convicted of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. Prosecutors said the murder conviction included an enhancement for Espinosa for using a gun to kill Zaytsev, and an enhancement for Nunes and Espinosa for carrying out the murder for financial gain.
The deadly shooting was reported shortly before 11 p.m. May 3, 2024, at Zaytsev’s home in the 4900 block of Hillridge Way, near Will Rogers Drive and just east of Del Campo High School in Carmichael.
Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home and found Zaytsev wounded by gunfire and sitting in his vehicle parked in the home’s driveway.
In the three months before the shooting, Nunes and her son conspired to kill her boyfriend, Zaytsev, and collect the proceeds from his life insurance policy, prosecutors said.
Zaytsev worked as a manager at a CVS store on Anderson Avenue in Folsom, a CVS spokesman said.
On the day of the Carmichael shooting, Espinosa and Esquibel rented a car and drove from Idaho to California to kill Zaytsev, leaving their cellphones in Idaho and using a prepaid phone to communicate with Nunes, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors said Espinosa and Esquibel arrived at Zaytsev’s home, where Espinosa got out of their vehicle, went to where Zaytsev was sitting in his vehicle and shot the CVS manager multiple times in the head. Espinosa and Esquibel then went back to Idaho.
Pursuant to the plan to kill Zaytsev, Nunes was not home when the murder was committed, according to the DA’s Office. Investigators questioned her when she returned home.
Prosecutors said Nunes pretended to have no knowledge of who could have killed her boyfriend, but investigators later found deleted text messages and calls on her phone that showed she was communicating with her son and his friend on the prepaid phone leading up to the murder.
As of Friday, Nunes, Espinosa and Esquibel remained in custody at the Sacramento County Main Jail. They are scheduled to return July 24 for their sentencing hearing in Sacramento Superior Court.
Prosecutors said Espinosa and Nunes face a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole and that Esquibel faces a maximum sentence of 26 years to life in prison.
