After brazen Sacramento shooting, families mourn dead as police continue search for gunmen

SACRAMENTO — The fog of chaos and the crime scene tape began to lift Monday after one of Northern California’s deadliest mass shootings – revealing new details about the six people slain in the capital city’s downtown, along with initial clues about who may have played a role in the bloodshed.

Authorities identified those killed in the shooting and announced the first arrest in what has turned into sprawling investigation, involving more than 100 videos and photos from bystanders who witnessed the massacre outside several Sacramento bars and clubs early Sunday.

“It’s a very somber place to stand in, knowing that so many people not just died, but so many people were injured, and there’s still so many people in the hospital clinging to life,” said Leia Schenk, 44, founder of the Sacramento-based community advocacy group Empact, who visited the scene Monday. “This was just so close to home — this is our backyard, and this is a street that we walk down so many times.”

Investigators said they had recovered more than 100 shell casings from the scene of the shooting, where multiple gunmen opened fire around 2 a.m. Sunday. The gunfire appeared to follow a large fight that had broken out as bars and clubs were closing for the night near 10th and K streets, just blocks from the state capitol building. But police released few new details about the shooting, as they continued to look for the suspected gunmen, including serving search warrants at three homes in the Sacramento area.

Police did announce the arrest of Dandrae Martin, 26, as a “related suspect.” He was booked early Monday into the Sacramento County jail on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon or firearm and illegal possession of a loaded firearm, both felonies.

Jail records show Martin had an outstanding arrest in warrant from Riverside County in connection with a 2014 domestic violence case, for which he was sentenced to three years probation, according to court documents.

Killed in the violence were: Sergio Harris, 38, of North Highlands; Johntaya Alexander, 21, of Elk Grove; Melinda Davis, 57; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32, of Salinas; Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21 of Selma and De’Vazia Turner, 29, of Carmichael, according to the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office.

Another 12 people were taken to nearby hospitals with gunshot wounds, though their conditions Monday afternoon remained unknown. They were shot in a hail of bullets that also damaged at least three buildings and three vehicles, Sacramento police said Monday.

Several of those slain had begun the night seeking a fun time in the heart of downtown Sacramento.

Turner was a father of four children who had just finished eating dinner and taking a shower at his mother’s house before going out to a birthday party at a club Saturday night, said his mother, Penelope Scott.

“This hurts. You’re taking lives from families,” said Turner’s mother, Penelope Scott, of the assailants. “Why can’t people just go out and have fun?”

In his free time, Harris loved sports and weightlifting. A father of three from Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood, he was working toward his goal of starting businesses of his own.

“He didn’t say too much, but his demeanor said a lot. Just his presence,” said his aunt, Mary Fair. “He was very fashionable — you see a guy with long dreads, always smelling good, with brand new shoes. He’s just a regular type of guy.”

“He had a legacy. He wasn’t just an ordinary person,” Fair added. “He had dreams and he had goals and he was achieving them, too.”

Also killed was Melinda Davis, 57, a homeless woman who had spent years living on the block where the gunfire erupted Sunday. Davis used the services at Maryhouse, the women’s center at the Sacramento Loaves & Fishes, “off and on for sometime,” the organization said in a Monday statement. “This was a space she came to find respite from the trauma of living on the streets of our city.”

She died in the same barrage of gunfire as Alexander, who was attending a club event downtown when the shooting happened, according to her cousin Rashea Allen. By the time she was 21, Alexander was attending school, working at Subway and had her own business as a cosmetologist, specializing in lace-front wigs for clients. She lived alone in her own apartment in the North Highlands and was “very well-established” for her age, Allen said.

“She had a lot of milestones that most of women her age didn’t get to do,” Allen added.

The shooting — the second mass casualty shooting to take place in Sacramento in the last five weeks — prompted fresh calls for gun control legislation, along with a growing concern about the rising tide of gun violence in California and the US.

Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., called on Congress to pass legislation requiring universal background checks for gun purchases, and to take action to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, military-style assault weapons and untraceable “ghost guns.”

“Enough is enough,” Feinstein said in a statement Monday. “We can no longer ignore gun violence in our communities. Congress knows what steps must be taken to stop the mass shootings, we just have to act.”

The shooting comes as gun violence across the nation continues to surge — a pandemic-era trend that has shown few signs of relenting over the last two years, said John J. Donohue III, a Stanford University law professor.

“We are in this really unhealthy explosion of shootings in the US,” Donohue said. “Which is really somewhat of a strange pathology right now because crime itself is not spiking sharply, but shootings are. So there’s clearly something unique about this moment.”

Even so, the shooting in Sacramento appeared to stand apart from other mass shooting events in the country, experts said.

Often, such incidents are the result of some premediated violence — a person seeking to inflict harm on a pre-determined list of group of people, or out to prove a point by inflicting harm on as many people as possible, said Peter Langman, who has extensively studied certain types of mass shootings as a contract researcher with the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center.

Rarely does so much bloodshed come from more spur-of-the-moment acts of violence, Langman said.

“If it is something that just erupted,” Langman said of the Sacramento shooting, “what sets it apart is the scale — the number of people killed or injured.”