National News

In California County With Highest Murder Rate, a City Confronts a Mass Killing

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — First two people were shot dead outside a trucking company on the southeast edge of the city. Then another was killed in front of a sporting goods store whose shelves are stocked with guns, and where Thursday morning the only sign of what happened was a bullet hole in the wall and a faint drop of blood on the sidewalk. Finally, two more people were killed at a house not far away, before the gunman shot himself in the stomach.

Posted Updated

By
Tim Arango
, New York Times

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — First two people were shot dead outside a trucking company on the southeast edge of the city. Then another was killed in front of a sporting goods store whose shelves are stocked with guns, and where Thursday morning the only sign of what happened was a bullet hole in the wall and a faint drop of blood on the sidewalk. Finally, two more people were killed at a house not far away, before the gunman shot himself in the stomach.

Even by the grim standards of the place with the highest murder rate in California, the shooting spree that killed five Wednesday night in Bakersfield, sparked by a domestic dispute, has shaken this industrial community.

“We have a lot of homicides, up and down the Central Valley,” Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said.

Youngblood placed the shootings in the context of the nation’s epidemic of mass shootings, calling it, “our new norm.”

“Now it’s our turn,” he said.

Unlike many of the recent mass shootings across the United States that have drawn so much attention, this appeared to have started as a domestic dispute between a husband and his recently divorced wife, according to police officers.

The killings punctuated a deadly time for this city, which sits in the agricultural region of California’s central valley and also counts oil production as another important industry.

The authorities here blame the increase in the murder rate on killings involving gangs and drugs — part of the county is a border between two rival gang territories, said Lt. Mark King with the sheriff’s department.

The Kern County district attorney, Lisa Green, said she had seen instances of domestic violence increase in recent years, as well as gang murders. She puts much of the blame for her county’s murder outbreak on California’s moves to reduce its prison population.

“I definitely believe the criminal justice reforms have released dangerous criminals who should be incarcerated,” she said. King agreed with that assessment and said that many in law enforcement did, too. Criminal justice activists dispute that there’s a connection.

The region, about 115 miles north of Los Angeles, has missed out on the economic boom of California’s coastal areas. Even as the area’s farms feed the rest of the state, and the oil wells account for about 70 percent of California’s production, it is economically depressed: the county’s unemployment rate is more than 8 percent, almost twice that of the state, and residents say gangs and drug use are rampant.

The killings Wednesday began in a desolate section of southeast Bakersfield, an important city on trucking routes through the Central Valley, whose businesses cater to those passing through: auto body shops, truck stops, fast-food restaurants, self storage.

The sheriff’s department identified the gunman as Javier Casarez, 54. The authorities said Casarez drove his wife to a trucking business near Highway 58, where he confronted another man, quickly killing him and then his wife.

Emily Meza, who owns an auto body shop next to the trucking company, was in her office when the shootings began. “I was in here with a customer and one of the workers ran in and said, ‘Lock the doors,’” she said.

Just as the shooting started, car alarms in the parking lot began wailing. “Then he did a U-turn and left,” she said. “He drove off.”

She was back at work Thursday morning, almost as if nothing happened. “You know, it’s just the adrenaline of the moment,” she said.

A third man was killed near the trucking company, and then Casarez, the authorities say, drove to a nearby home and killed two more people, a 31-year-old woman named Laura Garcia, and her father Eliseo Cazares, 57.

Casarez turned his gun on himself in the parking lot of an auto body shop, as a sheriff’s deputy ordered him to “put the gun down!,” according to body camera footage that the sheriff’s department made public. It all lasted about a half-hour, and when it was over, six bodies, including Casarez’s, lay at multiple crime scenes.

“These cases are without a doubt overwhelming,” Youngblood said. “Multiple crime scenes. We had all hands on deck last night.”

He said the gunman used a .50-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun — which he described as, “one of the largest handguns that are made.” Youngblood said they have not determined whether Casarez owned the gun legally.

Youngblood said investigators were still trying to piece together the relationships between the victims and the gunman, and said the final explanation may go beyond domestic violence.

“We don’t know that yet,” he said.

Last year, Kern County set a record with 101 murders, according to a tally kept by KGET, a local television station, even as murders dropped across California. And according to statistics released by state Attorney General Kern County last year had the highest per capita murder rate in the state, with almost 10 murders per 100,000 people.

Jose Sanchez, who lives next door to one of the murder scenes, said he knew his neighbors well, and was shocked. Sanchez, 43, an immigrant from Mexico who once worked the farm fields but now owns three trucks, said he has taken notice of the rise in murders here, but always felt a distance from them.

“There’s murders, but in my opinion they are mostly gangs and drugs,” he said.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.