VERDICT: GUILTY
“It’s very strange, how when you feel like, like that day. When the hate invades you already, then you feel ‘I’m going to do this now.’ That’s how it is. That’s how it happens”.
Those words were spoken by Josue Adalberto Corea-Vasquez during his videotaped confession on January 30, 2020 after being arrested outside of the Vons where he worked and charged for the murder of Jose Omar Hernandez Sanchez.
After a tumultuous week and a half, the jury trial of The People of California vs. Josue Adalberto Corea-Vasquez came to a verdict regarding Corea-Vasquez’s involvement in the murder that happened almost exactly five years ago.
The jury found Josue Adalberto Corea-Vasquez guilty of Penal Code Section 187, first degree murder in the means of lying in wait.
On Tuesday, October 19, the jury met to deliberate the fate of 29-year-old Corea-Vasquez, who pleaded not guilty for the murder of Jose Omar Hernandez Sanchez, also known as Omar Sanchez, who was shot to death 30 times with an AK-47 assault rifle in the driveway of his home at 200 Azimuth Street in Mammoth Lakes on October 9, 2016.
What follows is the last three days of the trial, including closing arguments and the defense’s sole witness: Josue Corea-Vasquez himself.
Corea-Vasquez was interviewed on January 30, 2020 by police officers, during which he was recorded on camera confessing to the murder of Omar Sanchez.
In the two-hour-plus long video, Corea-Vasquez appears calm and collected. He even
makes small talk with the police officers.
He then walks the investigators through a lengthy, detailed confession to the murder of Omar Sanchez, including how he used an AK-47 with a full magazine to kill Sanchez after learning his work schedule and waiting for him for 30 minutes, although it ended up being closer to 90 minutes.
Corea-Vasquez says that he shot Sanchez three times before Sanchez fell to the ground, after which he then unloaded the gun’s clip on Sanchez- another 27 bullets.
In the confession video he also admits that the car spotted at the scene of the crime was his, and that he drove off and turned right after Azimuth, went back to his home, and then cleaned the gun the next day before hiding it.
In the confession, he also says that he hated Omar Sanchez.
But during his testimony Corea-Vasquez insisted that the details of his confession were not what really happened, but instead were lies fed to him by investigators; this included allegations against lead investigator Chris Callinan and Mono County Sheriff’s Sergeant Magdaleno Hernandez, the two officers left alone with Corea-Vasquez during his confession.
During the entirety of his testimony, Corea-Vasquez repeatedly insisted that his confession was coerced by Callinan.
He even claimed that Callinan put a gun to his head and said that if he didn’t confess exactly how Callinan wanted him to, coaching him through every word, that Callinan would kill Corea-Vasquez and put his entire family in jail.
Corea-Vasquez claimed that all of the details he calmly delivered during his confession tape about how he killed Sanchez were exactly what Callinan told him to say.
Both Callinan and Hernandez asserted that these were flat out lies when they took the stand.
Corea-Vasquez said that the videotape confession was actually altered, that there were parts cut out during which time a gun was placed to his head.
At other moments, Corea-Vasquez claims that Callinan was pounding on tables and yelling, “I control this and I have the power” and that these parts of the video were cut out.
Corea-Vasquez was unable to point out any time stamps during the video where he believed it to be edited.
Although the video appears seamless, Corea-Vasquez argued that any expert in video altering would be able to tell that the confession video was altered; however, the defense chose not to call any expert of the kind to the stand.
Despite Corea-Vasquez’s claim of the confession being false, the defense also did not choose to bring a false-confession expert to the stand.
Corea-Vasquez claimed that Callinan forced him to write the exact wording of the apology letter to Sanchez’s children, who at the time were only 4 and 9 years old, which said, “I am sorry for what I’ve done, but when you get older you will realize that your father was a bad human and an even worse man”.
Callinan again insisted this was a lie.
Hernandez works as the unofficial Spanish interpreter for the Mono County Sheriff’s Department.
Under oath, Hernandez admitted that, while he did read Corea-Vasquez his proper Miranda Rights, he had neglected to translate Corea-Vasquez’s request for a lawyer properly to Callinan.
Hernandez chose to paraphrase Corea-Vasquez saying, “I will talk with you guys, but then I want a lawyer” to simply “he said he would talk to us”.
Therefore, Callinan did not know that the defendant wanted a lawyer at any time.
This also means that Corea-Vasquez was technically denied the right to counsel.
When Corea-Vasquez was arrested he was brought to the Bridgeport jail, where he was placed in a cell with 3 undercover police who tried to get information from him for about three hours. It didn’t work.
He did not confess any information until he was walked over to Callinan.
The AK-47 found to be the murder weapon was purchased from Edward Lasley, a fellow Vons employee, for $5,000 along with magazines and a .22 pistol. The gun was registered under Lasley’s father and illegally acquired by Corea-Vasquez.
Corea-Vasquez insisted that he thought he had purchased it legally, because Lasley had “shown him signed paperwork” that led him to believe so.
Some details still don’t add up.
Corea-Vasquez alleged that he let Francisco Ramirez Garcia, who had apparently become scared for his own life, borrow his AK-47 the night before the murder and he therefore didn’t even have it during the night of the murder.
This critical detail was never mentioned until Corea-Vasquez referenced it during his testimony at trial.
Omar Sanchez was killed at approximately 2:00 a.m. on October 9, 2016.
Vons’s time cards show that Francisco took his lunch break from 1:42-2:14 a.m. during the night of the murder.
Eliud Corea-Vasquez, the younger brother of Josue Corea-Vasquez, didn’t get to work until 3:09 a.m. that morning.
Eliud,not Josue, was the one who actually filed the formal complaint against Omar Sanchez as a manager to Human Resources, which got Sanchez demoted shortly before his murder.
Ultimately, Eliud ended up pleading guilty to being an accessory to murder after the fact.
Defense attorney Mark Davis requested for sentencing to be pushed back to next year, and it is currently set to January 18, 2022 in Bridgeport.
