New video shows California serial killer tied ‘on a mission’

Police in central California hunting a serial killer responsible for at least six slayings on Tuesday released a short surveillance video showing a person of interest with an unusually upright posture.

Ballistics tests and some video evidence linked six fatal shootings and the wounding of a homeless woman that occurred in Stockton and Oakland between April 2021 and Sept. 27 of this year, cops said.

“We don’t know what the motive is. What we do believe is that it’s mission-oriented,” Stockton Police Chief Stanley McFadden said during a press conference. “This person’s on a mission.”

A seconds-long surveillance clip that was released on Tuesday shows a man dressed in all black walking along a street. The police chief took note of how “upright” the man’s posture is.

“I like to think we have a normal gait and walk about us when we walk around, but this person’s posture is extremely upright,” McFadden told reporters, adding that the man in the video also has an “uneven stride.”

The first fatal shooting happened in Oakland in April 2021. The woman was wounded in Stockton days later.

More than a year passed, then the five killings in Stockton took place between July 8 and Sept. 27, all within a radius of a few square miles, police said.

Although cops would not say whether all seven shootings had been linked to the same gun, McFadden alluded to a single pistol during the news conference.

“I have absolutely no answer as to why that pistol went dormant for over 400 days,” the chief said, referring the the 448-day lull between the second shooting and the third.

Authorities last week announced that five men in Stockton were ambushed and shot to death, alone in the dark. On Monday, police said the two additional cases last year had been tied to those killings by ballistic evidence.

The person of interest being sought in the case appears on video at several crime scenes, but no evidence directly links them to the shootings, McFadden said.

He added that some of the victims were homeless and some were not. All but one of the fatalities were Hispanic men.

The first killing targeted Juan Vasquez Serrano, 39, in Oakland at around 4:15 a.m. on April 10, 2021. He was shot multiple times, according to the Alameda County coroner’s bureau.

In the nonfatal attack, the 46-year-old unhoused woman, who is black, told investigators that she was inside her tent at Park and Union street on April 16, 2021 at about 3:20 a.m. when she heard someone walking around outside.

“When she came out of her tent, she encountered someone holding a gun,” McFadden said.

The suspect shot the woman multiple times, but she tried to defend herself by advancing toward her attacker, the chief said. The shooter lowered the gun.

“She said there were no words mentioned at all,” McFadden said.

The woman described the attacker as being between 5 feet 10 and six feet, wearing a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, dark-colored pants and an all-black COVID-style face mask.

In the fatal Stockton cases, none of the men were robbed or beaten before the killings, and none appeared to have known one another, Stockton Police Officer Joseph Silva said. The shootings also do not appear to be related to gangs or drugs.

The San Joaquin County Office of the Medical Examiner identified the Stockton victims as Paul Yaw, 35, who died July 8; Salvador Debudey Jr., 43, who died Aug. 11; Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, 21, who died Aug. 30; Juan Cruz, 52, who died Sept. 21; and Lawrence Lopez Sr., 54, who died Sept. 27.

Yaw’s mother, Greta Bogrow, described her son, who was homeless at the time of his death, to the station KCRA as “a great man with a big heart.”

Debudey was in a parking lot in the 4900 block of West Lane when he was shot and pronounced dead at the scene, leaving behind his wife and daughter.

“It’s caused a lot of pain, a lot of pain to our family,” said Debudey’s widow, Analydia Lopez.

Shortly before 2 a.m. Sept. 27, Lopez was in the 900 block of Porter Avenue when he was shot and killed.

He “was just a person who was out here at the wrong place, at the wrong time, at the wrong circumstance,” his brother, Jerry Lopez, told KXTV-TV. “It’s hard to process that this has happened.

Police said four of the Stockton homicide victims were walking alone and a fifth was in a parked car when they were killed in the evening or early morning.

There is now a $125,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Police are fielding hundreds of tips daily, as well as submitting additional evidence in case other crimes in the state can be connected to the spate of shootings.

With Post wires