BRANDON HERNANDEZ WAS MAKING REPAIRS behind his north Stockton home when bullets punctured his garage — and one sailed clear through the house, from front wall to rear window. Wii Dao heard cracks that sounded like fireworks and cars roaring through the streets. And William Hendricks returned home from a family trip to Oregon to find “hordes of officers everywhere.”
All three men live in the eclectic, 1950s neighborhood surrounding Lucile Avenue, a grassy community some residents said had experienced some respite from deadly violence in recent years — until the Saturday night one week ago when a mass shooting at a child’s birthday party showered the neighborhood with gunfire.
Some who spoke to Stocktonia had vivid memories of past shootings, including a teen’s death in Sandman Park and an infamous bank robbery and deadly police shootout on nearby Thornton Road.
But those deaths were years ago. Since then, the stretch of strip mall shops and suburban homes had felt mostly peaceful.
“I felt safe there walking my dog,” 20-year resident Eugene Nieto said Sunday. “Recently, it was nice. Until last night.”
Saturday night’s shooting ripped through a family gathering of more than 100 people. It left more than a dozen people wounded and four dead — three of them children.
Days later, the search for multiple gunmen is still under way.
As the crime scene tape came down and investigators and news crews receded from the neighborhood, some residents were left wondering why the violence had returned, and how it could change their community.
The sound of gunfire
The 911 calls started flooding in around 6 p.m. that night: gunfire in the 1900 block of Lucile Avenue.
The scene was a newly opened venue called Monkey Space, in the former home of Kudos Children’s Theatre, which closed late last year. The event space is just southwest of the Thornton Road and Wagner Heights Road intersection.
Brandon Hernandez was fixing a door in the back of his house Saturday evening when he heard the shots. Bullets started hitting his garage door.
“I ran all the way to the back of (the yard) and called the police,” Hernandez said.
At her home across the street from the venue, another Lucile Street resident who declined to provide her name because of safety concerns said she heard the exact moment when the volley of gunfire began.
“My husband and I were at home, and we heard a ton of gunshots,” she said in a phone interview Sunday. “There was a whole lot of them.
“We went outside to see what the heck was going on,” the woman added. She said she and her husband then heard a flurry of yelling before they ran back inside as a new barrage rang out. Sirens flooded the area minutes later, she said.
To her husband, it sounded like three different kinds of guns, she said.
Up the street and around the corner from the venue, Wii Dao caught glimpses of the shooting’s aftermath.
Immediately after hearing sounds “like fireworks,” Dao heard the sound of cars flying through the neighborhood, he said.
History of violence
The injured were rushed to hospitals across the region. In the following days, the identities of four people killed would begin to emerge. A beloved brother who was 21, a 14-year-old basketball star, two elementary school-age children, including a young girl who would have turned 9 in the coming week.
For the city, it was a tragedy that leaders insisted they would not tolerate. For neighbors around Lucile Avenue, it was a reminder of violent moments in the past.
Before Saturday’s shooting, public safety problems in the neighborhood in recent years mainly consisted of less deadly incidents, such as burglaries, sideshows and domestic disputes, some residents said. Hendricks said his home had been burglarized several times.
“I’m used to stuff like that happening. It’s expected,” he said.
But multiple neighbors said the last time they remembered a deadly shooting approaching the scale of Saturday’s violence was in July 2014, when three armed men robbed a Bank of the West before taking three people hostage and leading police on an hourlong chase and shootout.
The ordeal left two suspected robbers and one hostage, Misty Holt-Singh, dead. Holt-Singh was killed in a hail of police gunfire during the chase from the bank, previously located a mile south of the latest shooting rampage. Officers fired more than 600 shots at the suspects’ vehicle, with Holt-Singh inside.
The National Policing Institute called it “a tragic and unprecedented day in U.S. policing history.” Like Saturday’s shooting, the crime sparked national headlines.
Around Lucile Avenue and across the city, the robbery has become a well-known episode in Stockton’s criminal history. Some people referred to it simply as “the bank robbery” or “the bank heist.”
In the years following the robbery, the area experienced periodic violence. Dao told Stocktonia he was shot just north of the neighborhood, in the Spanos Park area, around 2008, and said a friend was “jumped” at the Stockton Ballroom off Thornton around 2018.
Nieto said he remembered incidents a few years back in which children were killed at nearby Sandman Park, and across Davis Road at Dentoni Park.
Indeed, a 17-year-old as well as a 27-year-old were shot to death at Sandman in 2021, and a 7-year-old was found dead in a home just south of Dentoni in 2020.
But in the past two to three years, deadly encounters were less common, some residents said.
Police data may support their perception of a downturn in violent crime.
From January 2019 through December 2021, there were eight homicides in Sherwoods Manor, Stonewood and the surrounding area, bordered by White Slough, Hammer Lane and Lower Sacramento Road, according to the Stockton Police Department’s crime map. From 2022 to the present, there were five homicides in the area, the crime data shows.
As of Dec. 1, there have been 34 homicides in Stockton in 2025, according to a police spokesman. This time last year, Stockton had seen 46 homicides. Fifteen of this year’s deadly clashes have occurred in downtown and south Stockton, while 13 — including homicides near Anderson Park in February and Sherwood Mall in April — have unfolded in the city’s north, according to the crime data.
A shooting and the aftermath
Sheriff’s officials have said they believe the shooting was “targeted,” that there was “likely” more than one assailant and that there was an exchange of gunfire between people inside the event venue and people outside. Investigators recovered guns from the roof of the venue, but hadn’t yet confirmed through ballistics testing whether they were used in the shooting.
Officials have been vague about possible motives for the shooting. “We’re confident that this was not a random act. They walked into this area and were probably looking for somebody in particular,” Sheriff Patrick Withrow said Sunday. “Why they did that, what they’re part of, who they are, we don’t know,” he said.
Stockton’s Crime Stoppers hot line, Mayor Christina Fugazi and two City Councilmembers are collectively offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. The FBI, which is assisting with the case, has offered a separate $50,000 reward.
Law enforcement has asked anyone with information about the shooter or shooters to contact Crime Stoppers at (209) 946-0600 or the Sheriff’s Office’s non-emergency line at (209) 468-4400.
By Monday, Hernandez was inspecting the damage the shooting had wrought to the home he’d been working to repair.
Along with the bullets that struck his garage door Saturday night, he later found another shot had pierced his home’s front wall and passed through his den before smashing through the back window.
“I’m scared,” he said two days later. “I think I’m going to sell the house.”
Stocktonia Editor Scott Linesburgh contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Stocktonia.
