2 teenagers charged in Union City killings
Shooting outside of elementary school left 2 boys dead
Police arrested two teen suspects with alleged ties to a criminal street gang in the brutal murder of two young boys who were gunned down in November outside a Union City elementary school.
Union City police said 18yearold Jason Cornejo from Castro Valley and a 17yearold juvenile from Hayward both have been charged with the murders of the boys.
Sean Withington, 14, and Kevin Hernandez, 11, were fatally shot around 1:26 a.m. on Nov. 23 while in a van outside Searles Elementary
School in the city’s Decoto neighborhood. The slayings shocked and outraged the city of about 75,000, which until that day saw no other killings in 2019.
Union City Police Chief Jared Rinetti struck a personal note when announcing the
arrests Friday morning at Union City’s City Council chambers.
“Many members of our department have children of the same age, and this horrible violent crime affected us tremendously,” he said. “But it is nowhere near the pain and suffering these families have had to endure.”
Police said surveillance footage and witnesses helped them identify a vehicle seen fleeing the scene, which was described as a silver fourdoor Toyota Camry. Investigators used what they described as “electronic evidence” to link Cornejo and the juvenile suspect to the car, and data from both of their phones placed them at the scene around the time of the attack.
Additionally, a “close associate” of both suspects told police that the two rented the Camry two days before the double slaying, according to court records.
Investigators believed the motive is related to a rivalry between criminal street gangs. Police said they unearthed social media posts that showed Cornejo before the homicides buying and possessing an AK47 with a drumstyle, highcapacity magazine, which was one of the suspected weapons in the shooting.
Additional social media records showed the two suspects discussing their involvement in the slayings and showed the juvenile suspect attempting to sell a 9mm firearm the day after Withington’s and Hernandez’s deaths, police said.
Police in court records said Cornejo and the juvenile suspects are known associates of a street gang. Police have not noted what, if any ties the victims had to Decoto or any other gangs.
The arrests were the culmination of a widereaching, threemonth investigation that involved 32 investigators from Union City and assisting agencies and over 5,300 hours of detective work.
Both suspects were already in custody on unrelated charges.
Investigators last week served search warrants on six locations tied to the crime and seized a trove of evidence related to the double murder and potentially other crimes. Among the items confiscated were two handguns, three assault weapons, $10,000 in cash, 40 pounds of marijuana with a street value of $32,000 and 8 pounds of methamphetamine worth about $28,000.
Union City police boosted staffing and patrols in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Rinetti said, and in that time additionally seized five handguns and one assault rifle in the area of the murders.
“I share this because it was a volatile time in our community,” Rinetti said. “And in my opinion, our officers prevented additional violence and tragedy by removing these dangerous weapons from the streets.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who also attended the news conference, said he hopes the arrests and prosecutions can bring some measure of relief to a shaken community.
“I would say that the anguish, the disbelief, the apprehension ... that’s never going to go away,” he said. “(But) maybe what it does is bring a sense of direction and purpose, that we have to find some of the conclusions to some of these senseless acts of violence.”
The Union City Police Department said it is still investigating this case and more people might be charged in the future.
Home security video showed headlights of two vehicles in the parking lot as one rolled past the other that was parked.
One person was seen walking toward the moving vehicle and firing more than a dozen shots at the rolling vehicle, which came to a stop. The person continued shooting before turning around and running back to the parked car, which then left the scene.