{"id":272014,"date":"2026-04-17T04:38:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T04:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/272014\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T04:38:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T04:38:21","slug":"oakland-man-guilty-of-murder-along-shoreline-defense-focused-on-cartels-and-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/272014\/","title":{"rendered":"Oakland man guilty of murder along shoreline; defense focused on cartels and racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

OAKLAND \u2014 An Oakland man was convicted of murder for fatally shooting someone who he insisted to police was part of a drug cartel<\/a> that had been following him for years.<\/p>\n

Ginrhic Bernandino-Santiago, 26, was convicted of second degree murder and shooting into an occupied car in the Aug. 8, 2023 incident at the parking lot of the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline in Oakland. In a police interrogation, Bernandino-Santiago would later admit to the shooting but claim he knew that the victim, 59-year-old Francisco Torres-Felix, was a cartel member who was about to pull a gun on him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been followed around for a lot of years,\u201d Bernandino-Santiago explained to East Bay Regional Parks District police interrogators after the shooting. He later added, \u201cI was watching my rear view every time I would be around because I feel like people following me around for no reason \u2026 There\u2019s a lot of Mexicans following me around, even at jobs, walking around.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the outlandish nature of his claim, certain details about the shooting were either astonishing coincidences or indicators that there may have been more to the story. Police have revealed no known connections between the two men and defense attorneys argued they were strangers. But Torres-Felix had served a lengthy federal prison sentence for drug trafficking, stemming from a $1 million cocaine bust in 2007 that involved a drug ring with ties to suppliers in Mexico<\/a>, court records show.<\/p>\n

An unserialized gun was also found in Torres-Felix\u2019s car, but prosecutors contend it was wedged between the seats and not easily accessible. Torres-Felix\u2019s final phone communications were with a woman he knew; he said that he was at the shoreline to take his dog for a walk, and noted that it was \u201chot\u201d in the area. A few minutes later, he was fatally shot, after he and Bernandino-Santiago\u2019s cars pulled alongside each other and there was a brief exchange, according to court filings.<\/p>\n

In 2024, the prosecution was put on hold after Bernandino-Santiago\u2019s lawyer declared a doubt to his mental competency, but things picked up after he was found competent for trial.<\/p>\n

For their part, Bernandino-Santiago\u2019s public defenders argued that the shooting was self-defense based on Bernandino-Santiago\u2019s perceptions, arguing in a pretrial hearing that a white person who did the exact same thing wouldn\u2019t have been charged. Bernandino-Santiago told police that he believed a cartel had a grudge against his family because his father was a policeman in the Philippines.<\/p>\n

The defense objected to prosecutors using a picture of Torres-Felix smiling, arguing that this would give jurors the impression he wasn\u2019t part of a cartel, and that prosecutors use \u201cracially coded\u201d phrases like \u201cdrive-by shooting,\u201d because it would imply gang membership on Bernandino-Santiago\u2019s part. They also called a professor \u2014 an expert on cartel symbols \u2014 to testify about a knight symbol found at Torres-Felix\u2019s home and its possible link to the Sinaloa Cartel, court records show.<\/p>\n

On April 13, jurors returned their verdict, convicting the defendant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OAKLAND \u2014 An Oakland man was convicted of murder for fatally shooting someone who he insisted to police…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[861,117896,862,117895,143,145,864,144,865,36628],"class_list":{"0":"post-272014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-bay-area-crime","9":"tag-bay-area-drug-trafficking","10":"tag-california-crime","11":"tag-filipino-cartel","12":"tag-oakland","13":"tag-oakland-headlines","14":"tag-oakland-murder","15":"tag-oakland-news","16":"tag-oakland-shooting","17":"tag-sinaloa-cartel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}