MARTINEZ — A Richmond man has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 42 years, after a jury found he killed a man then torched his body near the Oakland Zoo to try and get away with it.

Jose Vazquez-Cano, 45, was convicted of second degree murder and arson of a corpse in the June 2023 killing of 25-year-old Bryan Barrios-Marroquin. On Friday, after trying and failing to fire his public defender through a legal motion, Vazquez-Cano was given 42 years to life, split between both charges and a firearm use enhancement.

Vazquez-Cano didn’t react when the sentence was being pronounced, nor when he listened to a letter submitted by Reno Barrios-Morales. The victim’s father described the “pain that has no cure,” with which he is now forced to live.

“I go to sleep crying and I wake up crying,” Barrios-Morales wrote.

Deputy District Attorney Kabu Adodoadji, who prosecuted the case, said in court Friday that Vazquez-Cano had racked up 22 jail discipline write-ups since he was arrested in 2023, and claimed that Vazquez-Cano admitted to being a former gang member and gave conflicting statements about being shot in El Salvador. The defense argued Vazquez-Cano’s childhood trauma and PTSD diagnosis warranted a more lenient sentence and that Judge Terri Mockler shouldn’t tack on an extra 25 years for using a gun to kill Barrios-Marroquin.

Mockler said that at trial, Vazquez-Cano had set himself up for several possible defenses by testifying that “the gun accidentally went off 11 times” but also that he had “acted in self-defense.” She said that by burning the body, Vazquez-Cano emboldened his defense because a forensic pathologist had a much harder time tracing the trajectory of the victim’s numerous gunshot wounds.

In the end, Mockler said she wouldn’t strike the 25-year enhancement, nor run the arson charge concurrently.

“Had it been a single shot, perhaps,” Mockler said. “But there were 11 shots.”

At trial, Vazquez-Cano testified that Barrios-Morales was irresponsibly handling the firearm and that Vazquez-Cano grabbed at it out of fear, then it discharged. Police say two other people witnesses the shooting and that Vazquez-Cano pressured them into dumping the body in Oakland and setting it on fire.

The body was found in a burning pickup truck on the 9500 block of Mountain Boulevard in the Oakland hills, police said. Vazquez-Cano was arrested and charged a month later.