convicted of second degree murder and arson of a corpse<\/a> 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.<\/p>\nVazquez-Cano didn\u2019t react when the sentence was being pronounced, nor when he listened to a letter submitted by Reno Barrios-Morales. The victim\u2019s father described the \u201cpain that has no cure,\u201d with which he is now forced to live.<\/p>\n
\u201cI go to sleep crying and I wake up crying,\u201d Barrios-Morales wrote.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s childhood trauma and PTSD diagnosis warranted a more lenient sentence and that Judge Terri Mockler shouldn\u2019t tack on an extra 25 years for using a gun to kill Barrios-Marroquin.<\/p>\n
Mockler said that at trial, Vazquez-Cano had set himself up for several possible defenses by testifying that \u201cthe gun accidentally went off 11 times\u201d but also that he had \u201cacted in self-defense.\u201d 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\u2019s numerous gunshot wounds.<\/p>\n
In the end, Mockler said she wouldn\u2019t strike the 25-year enhancement, nor run the arson charge concurrently.<\/p>\n
\u201cHad it been a single shot, perhaps,\u201d Mockler said. \u201cBut there were 11 shots.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MARTINEZ \u2014 A Richmond man has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[861,862,143,145,864,144,193608,193609],"class_list":["post-498841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-bay-area-crime","tag-california-crime","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-murder","tag-oakland-news","tag-oakland-zoo-murder","tag-richmond-murder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498841","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=498841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}