A jury has convicted two men of murder in connection with the January 2025 gang beating death of 23-year-old Oscar Umul Xicay at Elmwood Men’s Jail in Milpitas, closing out a criminal case that began when Umul Xicay was picked up on a misdemeanor and never made it out of custody alive. Pedro Arevalos, 43, was convicted of first-degree murder along with a gang-motivation allegation, while Jordan Patrick Haase was convicted of second-degree murder but acquitted of the gang-motivation allegation.
According to The Mercury News, Umul Xicay had been in custody for less than 12 hours after a misdemeanor arrest when the attack happened. As reported by the Palo Alto Daily Post, Umul Xicay had been arrested for misdemeanor vandalism after shaking a keypad outside Mountain View police headquarters and running from officers — a low-level offense that nonetheless landed him in a high-risk housing unit with no known gang ties of his own.
Trial evidence showed that jail surveillance cameras recorded Norteño gang members holding a meeting at 11:38 a.m., using terms like “Sureño” and “he can’t be here” — erroneously identifying Umul Xicay as a rival gang member just seven minutes before the attack began, per the Palo Alto Daily Post’s coverage of the case. Umul Xicay was leaving the facility showers around 11:45 a.m. that day when Arevalos and Haase blocked his path through a barracks, according to case facts reported by The Mercury News. Arevalos blocked his escape while Jose Antonio Rufino Jr. and Haase dragged him back to the showers, where Rufino kicked him in the face and caused him to hit his head against a window.
An Attack Timed to Beat the Clock
The beating lasted about 18 minutes, and a jail deputy did not find Umul Xicay until 12:03 p.m. He was transported to Valley Medical Center, where staff removed a portion of his skull because of brain swelling. Dr. Marc Lee, the neurosurgeon who operated on him, testified during the July trial that the emergency surgery was a “salvage operation” and that Umul Xicay would have suffered severe brain damage even had he survived, the Palo Alto Daily Post reported. He was pronounced dead on January 31, 2025…