San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced today that her office has convicted Lisa Gonzales, 55, after a trial by jury for a 2018 murder.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
A San Francisco jury found Lisa Gonzales guilty of the 2018 murder of her roommate, a long-awaited resolution to what District Attorney Brooke Jenkins called “one of the most gruesome crimes our city has experienced in recent history.”
Gonzales, 55, was convicted of second-degree murder last week, Jenkins announced Wednesday. During the nearly month-long trial, the jury heard testimony about the simmering tension between Gonzales and her roommate, 61-year-old Maggie Mamer.
After noticing broken or misplaced items around the Mission District apartment, Gonzales allegedly began pressuring Mamer to move out of the home they had shared since August 2017. Mamer, who was paying $400 in rent, stayed put. Gonzales complained about the dilemma to her coworkers, they suggested ways Mamer could legally be evicted.
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“No thanks,” Gonzales responded, according to the district attorney’s office. “I’ll do it my way.”
Gonzales grew up in the apartment and had protested her own attempted eviction four years earlier. In mid-April of 2018, she gave Mamer a 30-day notice to move out, prosecutors said. When their third roommate came home from work on her lunch break on May 15, Gonzales told her not to go into the bathroom.
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That evening, the roommate noticed “a metallic smell” throughout the apartment and heard “sawing noises” coming from the bathroom that went on for four hours, she told prosecutors. Gonzales was still in the bathroom the next morning. When the roommate got home from work that night, the metallic smell had been replaced by that of vinegar and bleach, she said.
“She observed a hacksaw under the sink in the laundry room,” prosecutors said. “When she asked where the victim had gone, Ms. Gonzales replied that she had left, ‘but not the way she wanted to.’”
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On June 1, Mamer was reported missing by friends, who investigators said were concerned about her souring relationship with Gonzales. The next day, a “concerned citizen” went to the police department to report a murder and dismemberment at a home on the 200 block of 14th Street, investigators said.
Officers from the San Francisco Police Department knocked on the door of the home and were welcomed inside by Gonzales, who said she lived there with one roommate and no one else.
“She also stated that the victim had once lived in the apartment but lied and claimed that she recently relocated to Eureka,” prosecutors said. “She also told the officers that she helped the victim move out on May 15, 2018, and she had not seen her since.”
When officers searched the building’s storage area, they found a blue plastic container that smelled of decay and was swarmed with maggots. Mamer’s decaying body was in a plastic bag inside, with her limbs cut off and stacked on top of her intact head and torso. Traces of her blood were later found in Gonzales’ bathroom.
An autopsy later found that Mamer had died from “sharp force injuries” to her head and heart. An allegation that Gonzales used a knife in the murder was also found true by the jury last week.
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Gonzales was promptly arrested and pleaded not guilty to the crime. Jenkins, who handled the case during her time in the district attorney’s office’s homicide unit, said “years of delay from Gonzales” stalled the trial until this February. Gonzales will next appear in court on April 24 to set her sentencing hearing. She faces 16 years to life in prison.
“This was very gruesome,” Jenkins said Wednesday. “It was very difficult to get through that testimony. But at the end of the day, this was about making sure that we held someone who is extremely violent and clearly very dangerous accountable.”