Police testify slain Union City children, 11 and 14, were gang members, targeted amid rivalry with Hayward Norteños
Police testimony has revealed a heartbreaking, suspected reason why three alleged gang members allegedly opened fire on 11-year-old Kevin Hernandez and 14-year-old Sean Withington as they sat in a parked van outside a Union City middle school, killing both boys.
The suspects, all members of a Hayward-based gang, targeted Kevin and Sean after identifying them as rival gang members from a subset in Union City. A Redwood City police investigator, testifying as a gang expert, agreed that both boys were part of a Norteño subset and that he’d first met Kevin when the boy was just 9 years old, during a traffic stop of a car full of “members and associates” of the gang.
The officer, Anthony Bellotti, used to work for the Union City Police Department. At a preliminary hearing for two of the three murder suspects — Carlos Zepeda and Jason Cornejo — Bellotti testified that the shooting was part of a rare rivalry between two Norteño gangs, which started in 2015. But Bellotti admitted two 2015 homicides attributed to the rivalry remain officially unsolved.
Zepeda and Cornejo are charged with murdering both boys and attempting to murder two other men in an unrelated shooting four days earlier. A third man, 21-year-old Oswaldo Flores was charged as a juvenile because he was 17 at the time of the shooting. Prosecutors have said all three suspects drove up in a rented Toyota and opened fire at the boys, who were sitting in Kevin’s mom’s stolen van outside Searles Elementary School at 1 a.m. on Nov. 23, 2019.
The trial for Zepeda and Cornejo has been scheduled for May. At their two-month-long preliminary hearing, prosecutors said cellphone pings from nearby towers placed both men at the scene of the crime, and that there was evidence their bluetooth data had been logged into the Toyota as well.
Judge Amy Sekany ordered both men to stand trial, saying the evidence tying Zepeda to the Toyota was “irrefutable,” but added there “could be” problems for prosecutors at trial based on what she’d seen. The legal standard for preliminary hearings is much lower than the reasonable doubt standard given to juries in criminal cases.
Cornejo’s attorney, Joseph Pendrod, argued there was nothing more than “ambiguous suspicion” toward his client, while Zepeda’s lawyers argued prosecutors had failed to even conclusively tie him to the Hayward gang, pointing out that he self-classified as “other,” not a gang member, when he was booked into jail. Bellotti testified that Zepeda was seen throwing up gang signs in a rap video and that evidence from his Instagram page supports the gang charges.