How Half Moon Bay shootings unfolded
Marciano Martinez Jimenez and a co-worker were watering mushrooms in a greenhouse at Concord Farms in Half Moon Bay on Monday when an older man approached through a door.
The worker, who asked not to be named, told The Chronicle he was standing 5 feet from Martinez when the short gray-haired man — later identified by authorities as Chunli Zhao, a former employee at the farm — entered the greenhouse and walked back out. The pair kept tending to the fungi, but the man quickly returned, the witness said, and fatally shot Martinez, 50, a 25-year resident of Moss Beach who spent his free time volunteering for a local free medical clinic in Half Moon Bay providing aid for those without health care.
The shocked co-worker backpedaled into a corner, trying to hide and fearing he’d be next.
“I was so nervous,” the worker said in Spanish.
But Zhao left the greenhouse and more gunshots followed.
It was the end of the second stage of Zhao’s alleged rampage, after prosecutors said he had already killed four mushroom farmers and injured a fifth at his employer, California Terra Garden, a 21⁄2-mile drive north up the agricultural coast of San Mateo County.
The worker’s story is one of the first witness accounts of a massacre that authorities say the 66year-old Zhao began at California Terra Farms, and that he allegedly continued at Concord Farms. The attacks left seven Latino and Chinese farmworkers dead, shattering a community that relies heavily on a farming workforce that lives in often squalid conditions.
Zhao is in custody and charged with seven counts of murder, attempted murder and gun enhancements, and has reportedly confessed. He allegedly killed four people at California Terra Farm — Qizhong Cheng, 66, of Half Moon Bay; Yetao Bing, 43, whose residence is not known; Jingzhi Lu, 64, of Half Moon Bay; and Jose Romero Perez, whose age and residence were not immediately known. Perez’s brother Pedro Romero Perez was injured in the shooting and hospitalized.
Zhao then drove south to Concord Farms where he killed three more people — Martinez; Zhishen Liu, 73, of San Francisco; and Aixiang Zhang, 74, of San Francisco — with the Ruger semiautomatic handgun he bought legally a couple of years ago, prosecutors have said.
Witness accounts, court documents and media reports have slowly painted a bleak timeline of an angry man who held grudges toward co-workers that led to violence and who toiled in a hidden community of farmworkers and immigrants living in squalor amid some of the priciest real estate in the world.
Around 2 p.m. Monday, a shift had ended at California Terra Garden where they grow and harvest shiitake mushrooms. A simmering grudge was about to boil over. Zhao had felt “disrespected” by co-workers for years and confronted his boss that afternoon to complain, according to law enforcement sources who spoke to NBC Bay Area. The boss may have taunted him with an offensive nickname, investigators told ABC News, during the exchange.
Zhao became furious when the boss — the charging documents indicate this was Qizhong Cheng, based on the sequence of shootings — dismissed his concerns, according to NBC, and rode off on his bicycle to another part of the sprawling farm full of dilapidated shipping containers that served as housing, along with mobile homes and RVs.
A half-hour later, sisters Erlin and Miriam Ortiz had finished their shift and heard a commotion from their car. They watched through their windshield as Zhao, his back to them and about 40 feet away, argued and shouted in Mandarin with his boss, they told the Bay Area News Group. Suddenly, Zhao pulled the Ruger from his red backpack and pointed it at Cheng, who covered his face with his arms, backing up. But Zhao shot him, the women told the news organization.
The Ortiz sisters said Zhao looked “super red and very angry” and shot another worker — Bing, based on prosecutors’ sequence of events — who was picking up a pallet of mushrooms. Bing fell but rose and attempted to escape; Zhao caught up to him and shot him again at close range, the sisters told the Bay Area News Group.
As they started their car to flee, the sisters made eye contact and Zhao started laughing and smiling, they told the news organization, before driving off in a forklift, passing by workers’ homes draped in plastic tarps, some with milk crates constructed as makeshift steps.
Zhao drove to his boss’ trailer on the farm, went inside and killed his wife, believed from charging documents to have been Jingzhi Lu, investigators told ABC News. They said he walked to another trailer and executed a farmworker, believed to have been Jose Romero Perez, who was sleeping inside his trailer, and shot and injured Romero’s brother.
Jose — a father and husband originally from Oaxaca, Mexico — had moved to Half Moon Bay about 18 months earlier, hoping to provide a better quality of life for his family. His brother underwent surgery at Stanford Hospital and remains in stable condition.
As the brothers lay bleeding at Terra Garden, prosecutors say Zhao drove south to his former employer, Concord Farms. After shooting Martinez in the greenhouse, the eyewitness told the New York Times that Zhao looked him in the eye, speechless, but before leaving gestured not to worry. The man said he ran outside and hid for about 15 minutes. He felt safe, he told the Times, only when Zhao drove away, but he soon came across the bodies of two co-workers, a married couple from China — the final two victims, Liu and Zhang, based on the charging document’s sequence of events — on a path connecting greenhouses.
After firing his final shot, authorities said Zhao drove and parked his car at a Half Moon Bay sheriff’s substation. An alert deputy spotted the car and Zhao was arrested at gunpoint, as television cameras filmed the arrest.
Inside the car, prosecutors said Zhao left a note. Sources told NBC Bay Area it was a “matter of fact” note, in which Zhao confessed to shooting eight people and urged his wife to care for their adult child living in China. Part of the note is still being deciphered.
Zhao spoke to detectives, declining to ask for an attorney, and was cooperative, officials said. There was no connection between the Half Moon Bay shooting and the weekend Monterey Park shooting that left 11 dead at a dance hall. Investigators also spoke to Zhao’s wife, who told NBC she knew nothing about any plans for a shooting.
In a jailhouse interview with NBC Bay Area, Zhao reportedly admitted to shooting his co-workers. Zhao told a reporter that he endured years of bullying and long hours working on the farms. He said he believes he suffers from mental illness and wasn’t in his right mind the day of the killings, NBC reported. He expressed remorse.
He also said he bought the gun in 2021 without any obstacles.
Zhao, a Chinese citizen, came to the United States about a decade ago on a work visa and has no criminal record.
However, in 2013, Zhao tried to suffocate a coworker at a previous job with a pillow, according to a restraining order application. The pair were roommates, and after Zhao quit his restaurant job, he confronted the man to get his job back, along with his paycheck. The coworker freed himself, he wrote a judge, and the pair wrestled for several minutes.
A couple of days later, Zhao confronted the man in their kitchen and threatened to split his head open with a knife over their work issues. The attack and death threats led to a temporary restraining order that lasted months.
It wasn’t the first violence on the California Terra Garden farm. Seven months ago, another employee at the farm opened fire on a co-worker after a dispute in the ramshackle living quarters adjacent to the greenhouses. Prosecutors said Martin Medina fired one shot through the door of a co-worker in July, and the bullet lodged in the wall of neighboring trailer. Yetao Bing was in that trailer with his wife when the bullet stuck in his wall. No one was hit during that shooting, but Bing was killed by Zhao in Monday’s mass shooting, prosecutors said.
During the July shooting investigation, prosecutors said investigators interviewed Jose and Pedro Romero — two other alleged Zhao victims — but they had no information.
On Thursday, Terra Garden employees locked the gate to the farm complex as San Mateo County officials toured the facility. A county supervisor left the visit calling the conditions “deplorable” and said both farms’ living areas would be red-tagged.
Outside the gate, someone propped up a bouquet of flowers against the fence. Piles of trash, including children’s bikes and toys, lay scattered around containers, along with two cars, a truck and several bicycles. One home had its own small, fencedoff garden patch.
Servando Martinez’s GoFundMe post exceeded its $30,000 goal Friday. The brother of Martinez, the man who died watering mushrooms, thanked donors.
“I’d like to thank God for the time I was able to spend with my brother Marciano,” Servando Martinez wrote on his fundraising site. “Marciano was an honorable person in our family. He was a good son, brother, uncle and a great friend for everyone that knew him. He took on the father role for all of us.”
He planned to use the money to transport his brother’s body back to their hometown in Oaxaca, Mexico.