OAKLAND — On paper, the future looked bright for Abraham Salgado-Alfaro.
In May 2020, he graduated from Rudsdale Continuation School in Oakland, then turned 18 a week later.
Then on June 24, 2020, Salgado-Alfaro shot and killed a man during an early morning stroll with his girlfriend, after the victim allegedly made disparaging remarks toward the young woman and started a fight. Eleven months later, Salgado-Alfaro was arrested and charged with murder, court records show.
Last month, Salgado-Alfaro, now 23, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter for killing 29-year-old Ernesto Herrera. In exchange for his plea, he was sentenced to nine years in state prison, most of which he has already served while his case was unresolved.
According to witness testimony and court records, Salgado-Alfaro and his girlfriend planned to take a short walk around their neighborhood because they liked to look at goats that were cleaning dead grass out of a nearby abandoned lot. On the 9000 block of E Street, a little before 2 a.m., they came across Herrera, who was living in a car that had been stripped of its wheels and engine parts and left in an alley.
Herrera allegedly “catcalled” Salgado-Alfaro’s girlfriend, who testified at the 2025 preliminary hearing that she brushed off the offense and tried to keep walking. Salgado-Alfaro yelled back at the man and they began shoving each other, she said on the witness stand. Then she saw him pull a gun and strike Herrera in the head, who taunted Salgado-Alfaro that he didn’t have the audacity to pull the trigger, she testified.
Then a gunshot rang out.
“I was kind of there frozen at the end of the alleyway, he kind of rushed toward me, takes my hand, we just go around the block for some reason,” she testified. “I’m just so — it happened so fast. I was still trying to process it.”
She later admitted to lying to police to make it seem like Herrera had backup at the scene, which she said was an effort to minimize Salgado-Alfaro’s culpability.
“I was young, I was dumb and I had so much feelings for him still, like, I thought I could save him,” said the woman, who has since left the area and enrolled in nursing school. “But now I know that was wrong in every aspect and I want to apologize to everybody sincerely.”
In his police interview, Salgado-Alfaro claimed that Herrera seemed to be pulling a weapon by reaching across his body toward his waistband as they struggled.
The defense argued that Herrera was the aggressor and placed Salgado-Alfaro into a dangerous situation. Salgado-Alfaro’s attorney also filed multiple unsuccessful motions to transfer the case to juvenile court, arguing that Salgado-Alfaro was barely an adult and that his IQ was measured in the 8th percentile.
Salgado-Alfaro remains at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, with a restitution hearing set for May, court records show.