Jose Vazquez-Cano was sentenced to 42 years to life for killing Bryan Barrios-Marroquin and burning his body near the Oakland Zoo.

Eleven shots and a burned body drove the sentence. Mockler rejected the defense account that the gun went off by accident in self-defense, and she kept the arson term from running concurrent with the murder because the fire made it harder to map the wound paths. The firearm enhancement is the piece that turns a 15-to-life baseline into decades before parole eligibility.

Jose Vazquez-Cano, 45, of Richmond was sentenced this week to 42 years to life in state prison, with no parole eligibility for 42 years, for the June 2023 killing of Bryan Barrios-Marroquin, 25, Hoodline reported, citing The Mercury News. Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Terri Mockler imposed the sentence in Martinez after a jury convicted Vazquez-Cano of second-degree murder and arson of a corpse. The total folds in a 25-year firearm-use enhancement that Mockler declined to strike.

Barrios-Marroquin was shot on June 3, 2023, in Richmond, and his body was found the same day inside a burning pickup on the 9500 block of Mountain Boulevard in the Oakland hills near the Oakland Zoo, according to Mercury News reporting from 2023 that Hoodline summarized. Investigators traced the burning truck back to the Richmond shooting. Vazquez-Cano was arrested and charged about a month later.

At trial, Vazquez-Cano testified that Barrios-Marroquin handled the firearm irresponsibly, that he grabbed it out of fear, and that it discharged 11 times by accident in what he called self-defense, Hoodline reported. Mockler was not persuaded. "Had it been a single shot, perhaps. But there were 11 shots," she said, according to that account. She also said burning the body made it harder for a forensic pathologist to trace the trajectories of the gunshot wounds, a reason she gave for declining to run the arson sentence concurrent with the murder.

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, Hoodline reported. Deputy District Attorney Kabu Adodoadji told the court Vazquez-Cano had accumulated 22 jail discipline write-ups since his 2023 arrest and argued against leniency. The defense cited childhood trauma and a PTSD diagnosis and asked the judge not to add the firearm enhancement. Shortly before sentencing, Vazquez-Cano tried unsuccessfully to fire his public defender. Barrios-Marroquin's father, Reno Barrios-Morales, submitted a letter saying, "I go to sleep crying and I wake up crying." All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.