HAYWARD — Ashley Sandoval and Taiz Vega-Mendoza had once been friends. By Dec. 4, 2020, the good will between them had disintegrated completely.
They’d seen each other in an unlicensed nightclub in Oakland, each with a small group of other young women. They’d argued and fought, then loaded into two separate vehicles, where Sandoval’s car began to pursue Vega-Mendoza and three friends, including Sonia Gonzalez and Julissa Aguilar-Yoc. The pursuers yelled taunts, threw bottles, and expected the two women to settle their differences with a fistfight, according to court records.
But on the 25000 block of Eldridge Avenue in Hayward, gunfire erupted. Everyone in Sandoval’s vehicle was struck by at least one bullet. Police found evidence that two shooters had armed themselves and shown up there at Gonzalez’s behest, who allegedly relayed directions from Vega-Mendoza. When Sandoval’s vehicle showed up, the ambushers were ready, according to court records.
One of the women in Sandoval’s vehicle said she assumed it was fireworks at first, but then “blacked out” when she saw sparks hitting the ground around them. When she came to, she was bleeding, and a friend was yelling at Ashley to “wake up.”
“Ashley was passed out, I thought she fainted. So I knew automatically that we needed help,” the woman testified in 2022.
But Sandoval, 19, had been hit in the head. Her family would later make the agonizing decision to take her off life support.
“The last day that I could say goodbye to my daughter, that I could hug her and kiss her, I promised that justice would be served on her behalf,” her mother, Suli Barron, said in court in 2024.
Now, more than five years after the shooting, the case has resolved for three women and two men who were all originally charged with murder. It was a resolution victims characterized as unsatisfactory, given the trauma they’re still enduring.
Vega-Mendoza, 25, Gonzalez, 26, and Aguilar-Yoc, 26, all received sentences of four years they had already served in prison for voluntary manslaughter. though Vega-Mendoza’s deal was only finalized on Jan. 5. The others took plea deals in 2024.
The two shooters, Jose Bedolla and Kevin Colindres, both 23, received 21-year sentences, also after pleading no contest to voluntary manslaughter. Their attorneys originally insisted that the two men only wished to shoot out the tires of the car containing Sandoval and the others, and that the shooting had simply been an accidental result of a horribly-thought-out plan.
In a letter to the court, one woman said surgeons installed a metal plate in her arm, which was broken by a bullet. But the physical injuries were only half of it.
“From battling depression, going through sleepless nights, dealing with PTSD, paranoia, and constant worry … These past years have been the most painful and hardest years of my life,” she wrote. But she concluded, “Ashely would want all of us to move forward for her knowing we’re continuously thinking of her as the days go by … I love you Ashley. I will always carry you in my heart.”
Another of the victims wondered — a question repeated by prosecutors throughout the case — how more people weren’t killed that night.
“They wanted us dead. We are here by the grace of God,” she wrote.
The conflict was the result of a romantic encounter between Vega-Mendoza and Sandoval’s ex-boyfriend, a man referred to in court records only as “Diablo.” The betrayal was exacerbated by back-and-forth arguing online and the posting of explicit material, only worsened when the two groups met up in Oakland the night of the shooting.
Afterwards, several of the people in the car with Vega-Mendoza said they were terrified of being harmed by their pursuers. Prosecutors countered — based largely on the testimony of one woman in Vega-Mendoza’s car, who testified for prosecutors and was never charged — that the women had overstated their fear and concocted a story afterwards, even going so far as to write out a “script” that shifted blame away from them.
At the November 2022 preliminary hearing, Judge Paul Delucchi openly mocked this theory, after calling the whole incident a “pathetic” and “repugnant” tragedy that was the result of a pointless conflict and horrible judgment on everyone’s part. He bristled at the idea that Bedolla — an alleged Hayward gang member — and Colindres were some sort of “expert marksmen” who could somehow shoot out a moving car’s tires without harming any of the four occupants. He lambasted the “consistent diet of deceit, deception, and denial” that came from the defendants afterwards.
“Those tires by the way, they’re fine. You can go stick them on another car right now and they’re good to go,” Delucchi said. “There’s nary a scratch to those tires, but we saw what happened to everybody inside.”
He said the idea that the motive of the shooting was over “a prince of a man named Diablo” only made it more senseless, and that everyone’s decision-making skills were likely impacted by the “smoking of marijuana and drinking of alcohol” that night.
“This is over straight, trivial nonsense,” Delucchi said. “It’s over nothing.”
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