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.
Mockler also said that burning the body made it harder for a forensic pathologist to trace the trajectories of the victim's gunshot wounds, a factor she weighed in declining to run the arson sentence concurrently with the murder conviction. Police said two other people witnessed the shooting and that Vazquez-Cano pressured them into dumping the body in Oakland and setting it on fire.
Defense Cited Trauma, Prosecution Cited Jail Record
The defense argued that Vazquez-Cano's childhood trauma and a PTSD diagnosis warranted a more lenient sentence, and attorneys urged Mockler not to add the 25-year firearm enhancement on top of the underlying charges. The judge declined to strike that enhancement, leaving the full weight of the gun-use allegation intact.
Deputy District Attorney Kabu Adodoadji, who prosecuted the case, told the court that Vazquez-Cano had accumulated 22 jail discipline write-ups since his 2023 arrest. Adodoadji also claimed in court that Vazquez-Cano admitted he was a former gang member and had given conflicting statements about having once been shot in El Salvador, details the prosecution used to argue against leniency.
Shortly before sentencing, Vazquez-Cano tried unsuccessfully to fire his public defender through a legal motion, a last attempt that did not delay the outcome. Under the California Penal Code's general sentencing framework for homicide, second-degree murder alone is punishable by 15 years to life in state prison, according to California Legislative Information — a baseline the firearm enhancement and arson conviction substantially extended in this case.
A Father's Grief Submitted to the Court
Barrios-Marroquin's father, Reno Barrios-Morales, submitted a letter to the court describing the pain that has followed his son's death. “I go to sleep crying and I wake up crying,” he wrote, a statement that underscored the human toll behind the legal proceedings as the case reached its conclusion.
