An 18-year-old who was a suspect in three separate homicides one in Livermore, one in Sacramento, and one in Fresno was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound late Thursday night after a five-and-a-half-hour standoff with police. As the Chronicle reports, Oakland police were called to a Motel 6 in East Oakland just before 6 p.m. on Thursday where suspect Jason Alexander Brown had apparently barricaded himself, after it seems he was located by Livermore police who were on his trail. After over five hours of attempting to talk him out of the room, police entered the room at 11:30 p.m. and found Brown dead.
As ABC 7 reports via a viewer in the area who witnessed the scene, the police and SWAT team began surrounding the motel near the Oakland Coliseum at 3:30 p.m.
Brown was wanted in connection with an October 24 shooting in a CVS parking lot in Livermore in which 32-year-old Jose A. Mendoza of Turlock was killed via a high-powered rifle, and and 22-year-old Ulizes Benitez was injured.
Brown apparently got around, and he was also wanted in a drug-related shooting a month earlier in Sacramento. This was another parking lot murder on September 28, at a Home Depot, in which 53-year-old Walter Gibson was found dead from several gunshot wounds to the upper body. A second suspect in that killing, John Bunch, has been arrested.
And two weeks prior, on September 12, Brown is suspected of killing 27-year-old Albert Thao while he was eating dinner at Mekhong Restaurant in Fresno. He died of a gunshot wound to the neck, and his dining companion was also shot.
Per the Contra Costa Times, Oakland police tried for hours to convince Brown to surrender, including trying to get his mother to talk to him on the phone, but ultimately they heard the gunshots after 11 p.m., at which point they fired tear gas into the motel room. They then found Brown dead. Officers fired no shots in the course of the evening.