A Richmond man was sentenced to 42 years to life in prison, with no chance of parole for 42 years, for shooting a 25-year-old man and then having his body dumped and burned inside a pickup truck near the Oakland Zoo. Jose Vazquez-Cano, 45, was sentenced in Martinez after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder and arson of a corpse in the June 2023 killing of Bryan Barrios-Marroquin.
The sentence, handed down this week, folds together the murder and arson convictions with a 25-year firearm-use enhancement that the judge declined to strike, according to The Mercury News. A jury found that Vazquez-Cano killed Barrios-Marroquin and then burned his body, capping a prosecution that began when investigators traced a burning truck in the Oakland hills back to a shooting scene in Richmond.
Barrios-Marroquin was killed in a June 3, 2023 shooting in Richmond, and his body was found later that same day inside a burning pickup truck parked on the 9500 block of Mountain Boulevard in the Oakland hills, near the Oakland Zoo, according to a separate mercurynews.com report from 2023. The report described gunshot wounds. Vazquez-Cano was arrested and charged about a month after the body was discovered.
Judge Rejects Self-Defense and Accident Claims
At trial, Vazquez-Cano testified that Barrios-Morales had handled the firearm irresponsibly and that he grabbed it out of fear before it went off, and that the gun then discharged 11 times by accident in what he described as self-defense. Judge Terri Mockler, who presided over the case, acknowledged that testimony in her ruling but was unmoved by it. “Had it been a single shot, perhaps. But there were 11 shots,” Mockler said, according to the same report…