STOCKTON SAW A sharp increase in its number of homicides last year, finishing 2024 with a New Year’s Eve fatal shooting that contributed to the third-highest tally in the past decade.
The city ended the year with 54 people dying at the hand of another person — almost always due to gun violence — compared to 45 in 2023. That’s a 20% increase, Stockton Police Department statistics show.
Even with the jump, however, the number is not a record. In 2020, 56 people were killed; in 2017, the count was 55.
Still, it was also far from the lowest: 33 deaths were reported in 2018.
Police say the motive behind most of the slayings isn’t known, but there was one bit of good news: fewer likely died as a result of gang involvement last year, they said.
“It appears as though we had more gang/group-related homicides in 2023 than we did in 2024,” Stockton Officer Omer Edhah said when reached for comment.
As the killings piled up late in the year, police detectives were having a harder time solving them. What the department calls a “clearance rate” — meaning the number of cases in which a suspect is identified and arrested — finished the year at 50%, Edhah said. That percentage slipped from 57% as of late November, but it was way above last year’s solve rate of 36%.
The national clearance rate was about 52% as of 2022.
Cases with few suspects
Many of Stockton’s killings fit the same routine: gunshots reported to police, with arriving officers finding a victim mortally wounded or already dead — and, at least initially, no suspect in the homicide.
Others were particularly heart-wrenching. Just last month, officers found the bodies of Alice Montejano, 43, and her 19-year-old son, Reuel Huerta, in their Belleview Avenue home. Montejano appeared to have been brutally beaten, and Huerta had been cut, victims of an apparent domestic dispute.
Stockton police are still searching for Julio Ceasar Valdez, 38, in connection with the double slaying while dangling the possibility of a $10,000 reward for his capture.
The end-of-year statistics also don’t capture the breadth of the city’s gun violence. Those shot but who survive are often saved by the quick action of responding officers and doctors. Such was the case last month when a 14-year-old girl was shot on Hammer Lane by a man who fled in a car. She was rushed to an area hospital, where she was treated for injuries that were not deemed life-threatening.
And the new year has already seen its first homicide.
Less than 24 hours after detectives discovered Stockton resident Michael Pruitt, 42, suffering from gunshot wounds in the Valley Oak District, they were called to another nearby scene, where Latoya Scrivens, 47, had been shot to death. Scrivens’ son Jkwon Williams, 20, was arrested on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter in connection with his mother’s death, authorities said. No suspect has been identified in Pruitt’s fatal shooting.
This story originally appeared in Stocktonia.
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