Berkeley police have arrested a man on suspicion of killing his girlfriend after the city’s first homicide in over a year was reported this weekend, and court records show he was still on probation for a separate hate crime when he was taken into custody.
On Saturday, a property manager at an apartment building on the 1900 block of California Street called police after finding a tenant dead inside her unit. Officers arrived to find the body of a 37-year-old Berkeley woman who appeared to have died from a physical assault, police said. The victim has not yet been identified by authorities. Detectives soon identified the woman’s boyfriend, Damarcus Jones, as a suspect and obtained a warrant for his arrest. Police found Jones in Dixon and arrested him “without incident” on Tuesday, police said. The Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau is performing an autopsy to rule on the official cause of death. The case has been referred to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office for prosecution.
KTVU-TV reporter Henry K. Lee reported Wednesday that Jones has a prior conviction for assault and a hate crime stemming from a 2019 attack near Gilman Street and Stannage Avenue in Berkeley. In that assault, Jones threatened to kill a man, punched and kicked him and and used a homophobic slur after the man objected to his erratic driving. Alameda County Superior Court records show Jones was sentenced in December 2025 to one day in jail and two years of probation, set to expire in December 2027, for assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury and a hate crime. Public records list Jones, 28, as having an address in Fairfield.
The killing is Berkeley’s first homicide since January 2025, when a woman was stabbed during an alleged van theft. Berkeley recorded just one homicide in all of 2025 and four in 2024.