MARTINEZ — A Contra Costa jury has convicted an East Bay man of multiple murders and attempted murders in connection with a 2021 mass shooting that’s only one of numerous homicides tied to violence between two warring Oakland gangs.
Enrique Ramirez-Calmo, 29, was convicted Wednesday of three murder counts, four counts of attempted murder and related sentencing enhancements. He faces a life sentence and remains jailed.
The June 20, 2021 shooting interrupted a joyous, musical celebration of Guatemalan Summer Solstice and Father’s Day, when two gunmen opened fire at a packed house party on the 2100 block of Dunn Avenue in Richmond. The suspects, Ramirez-Calmo and co-defendant Geovani Garcia-Jacinto, are alleged members of a predominantly Guatemalan-American gang called the South Side Locos 502 Sureños, whose main rivals are a Norteño gang also based in Oakland.
None of the victims were rival gang members, but the suspects falsely assumed some would be there, according to Deputy District Attorney Chad Mahalich, who prosecuted the case. Killed were Andres Morales-Garcia, Rudy Godinez-Aguilar and Hector Rigoberto Carrillo-Ruiz. Four others were wounded, including a man who was shot in the liver and went into a medically induced coma.
Garcia-Jacinto — also accused of an additional, unrelated homicide — is being prosecuted in juvenile court, for now. He’s charged with committing four murders while still in his teens. Additionally, authorities say Ramirez-Calmo is a suspect in two separate 2019 homicides in Oakland, but was never charged.
The trial hinged on gang evidence, video — including one from a cellphone camera that was held by one of the murder victims — and, most notably, Ramirez-Calmo’s own confession to police, which his attorney argued was all lies that Ramirez-Calmo made up to avoid being labeled a snitch by the gang.
According to the defense, Ramirez-Calmo confessed rather than tell on other Sureños because he feared he would share the fate of a woman who “ran her mouth” about the gang. On Oct. 18, 2021, 31-year-old Carolina Carrillo-Mendoza was lured to the Oakland Hills and shot in the head. Garcia-Jacinto later told Ramirez-Calmo that she had been killed because the gang feared she knew too much about the triple-homicide, according to police and court records.
An alleged SSL-502 member named Matias Mendoza, 22, was charged with murder in Carrillo-Mendoza’s killing as an aider and abettor, though he ultimately accepted a plea deal to manslaughter, for one day in jail and probation.
