In rapid succession on a brutal Saturday, Fresno surges to 50-homicide mark for 2020
Fresno police officers, who a few hours earlier shot and wounded a man suspected of fatally stabbing his mother, were investigating two more killings late Saturday night to close out a particularly rough six-hour stretch across the city.
Even by the standards set in recent weeks and months, when a surge in shootings and other violence fueled the launch of a new police task force, this night, in particular, stretched the department thin.
The three deaths, occurring from shortly after 4:30 p.m. to just before 11, pushed Fresno’s homicide total for the year to 50. At this time last year, there had been 34 murders, police said.
Amid what was expected to be work past midnight by multiple city and county investigative teams of the late-afternoon officer-involved shooting and slaying that led up to it, separate shootings left two people dead and another with a gunshot wound in the parking lots of a pair of businesses.
About 9:38 p.m., a report of shots fired led to the discovery of a man believed to be in his 30s dead from multiple gunshot wounds at the parking lot of the Dollar Tree in the 4900 block of East Kings Canyon Avenue.
Capt. Anthony Martinez said it was the 21st homicide this year in the southeast policing district that he commands.
The Fresno County Coroner’s Office on Wednesday identified the victim as Francisco Garcia, 28, of Fresno.
And then just before 11 p.m., officers responded to another report of shots fired, this time in a parking lot off Fresno Street, near Shaw Avenue, in the area near Fashion Fair Mall. Two people were taken to the hospital, with one dying of his injuries there.
A store clerk, who police said appears to have been trying to break up a disturbance, had non-life-threatening injuries.
The Fresno County Coroner’s Office on Wednesday identified the slain victim as Tylon Packard, 23, of Clovis.
In the late Saturday afternoon incident, a man who called 911 to report a murder, eventually admitting he stabbed his mother to death, was shot multiple times by officers after he advanced on them while armed with a kitchen knife, a Fresno Police official said.
A woman in her 50s was found dead inside a home the man shared with his mother and her sister at Balch and Cedar avenues.
This story was originally published October 17, 2020 at 11:39 PM.
