Salvador Vazquez-Oliva convicted of family’s South Land Park slayings that shocked Sacramento
Salvador Vasquez-Oliva, whose 2017 murders of his wife and family inside their South Land Park home shocked the capital region, has been convicted in the grisly killings and now faces the penalty phase of his trial.
Vasquez-Oliva was convicted May 1 in Sacramento Superior Court of four counts of first-degree murder, with allegations of personal use of a deadly weapon and the special circumstance of multiple murders at trial before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Sweet, according to Sacramento County District Attorney’s officials.
Sweet is presiding over the trial’s penalty phase which was slated to begin this week. Prosecutors had said they intended to seek the death penalty.
Vasquez-Oliva, now 62, was 56 when he bludgeoned his wife, Angelique Vasquez, 45, and their two children, daughter Mia Vasquez, 14, and son Alvin Vasquez, 11, to death. He also fatally stabbed niece Ashley Coleman, 21, at the family home on 35th Avenue in March 2017. The four were discovered by Sacramento police during a welfare check prompted by a call from a concerned family member.
Hours after their bodies were found, police tracked down Vasquez-Oliva in a San Francisco neighborhood. Sacramento prosecutors would later say Vasquez-Oliva’s confession to family members there led police to the South Land Park home.
The Sacramento man had worked as a technician in the state’s Employment Development Department before the slayings.
The crimes shocked at the time not only in their brutality but the setting, a quiet home in a 35th Avenue neighborhood where many residents had lived for years; the victims, a family nearly universally described by neighbors as kind, generous and outgoing.
Neighbors knew the children’s love of sports, Mia’s of soccer; younger Alvin’s love of basketball. Angelique was a friendly face at the state’s Employment Development Department. She worked for 11 years as a personnel technician for the department. Vasquez-Oliva was a state employee for more than 10 years at the time of the killings.
Adding at the time to the sense of foreboding, the dayslong processing of the crime scene inside the home, shrouded behind yellow police tape, as neighbors wondered what had become of the family.
Such was the community’s grief that neighbors filled its streets during a candlelight vigil that included Sacramento city Councilman Jay Schenirer and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg.
