OAKLAND — Francisco Rosas-Rosales and Charlie Alvarado were at a Richmond bar drinking one night when Rosas-Rosales came up with a sinister way to wrap up their evening.
As Alvarado would later recall, Rosas-Rosales wanted them to drive out to Oakland and “take advantage” of sex workers. At first, the night went as planned, but then the two reportedly bumped into another group that was on an equal but opposite mission that evening, with violent results.
By midnight on July 6, 2021, Rosas-Rosales, 43, was dead from gunshot wounds suffered on the 2000 block of East 19th Street in Oakland. Police were left with a mystery, and a case where no one was innocent.
The murder case that resulted is one of Oakland’s most bizarre in recent memory. An arrest was only made because one of the suspects gave an anonymous tip that ultimately implicated herself. She later gave conflicting statements during a seven-hour interrogation that her attorney described as unconstitutional, coercive and based partially on an illegal cellphone search.
Alvarado, who admitted under oath that he agreed to a plan to kidnap and violently “take advantage” of prostitutes, was given a grant of immunity to testify.
In the end, no one was actually convicted of killing Rosas-Rosales. Two suspects believed to have been the gunman remain free. The only person to be charged, a woman named Jaylynnkelly Walton, recently pleaded no contest to robbery for a nine-year sentence, but the murder charge against her was dropped.
Alvarado told police that the plan was hatched at the bar, and that it was Rosas-Rosales’ idea. He said they’d originally picked up prostitutes in Oakland, then gone to Richmond and spent some time drinking together when Rosas-Rosales proposed a return trip.
“Rosas-Rosales came up with a plan whereby they would rob the prostitutes and have ‘free sex’ with them,” Alameda County prosecutors wrote in court filings. “The specific plan was that Rosas-Rosales would drive the vehicle and Alvarado would grab onto the woman who got into the car to prevent her from leaving.”
So off to Oakland they went, settling on an area around San Antonio Park that is no stranger to prostitution, or homicides related to the sex trade, authorities said.
The women they encountered there were too smart for them, according to court records.
Rosas-Rosales initially tricked one sex worker into their car and attempted to force them there, but she played along long enough to give herself an exit, and fled into the night. Next, Rosas-Rosales convinced another woman to get in the car, only to have Alvarado jump on her in a surprise attack. She, too, was able to escape, according to prosecutors.
Then came a mysterious gunman, who fired a shot at Rosas-Rosales just a few moments after the second victim got away. He died at a hospital later that night, authorities said.
The case went unsolved for two weeks, until police received an anonymous tip warning that a robbery crew was going around Oakland targeting people who solicited sexual services from prostitutes. Investigators looked into the tip and determined it had come from Walton, who was 20 at the time.
Walton was ultimately detained and interrogated for seven hours. She gave conflicting statements, but admitted at one point to participating in more than 20 robberies with her boyfriend — a juvenile at the time — and a second man. She also said her relationship with the teen was “toxic” and that they’d recently shot at one another, according to court records.
Walton’s lawyer filed court paperwork alleging that Oakland police Detective Wenceslao Garcia illegally searched Walton’s cellphone and tricked her into making an admission of guilt. While the attorney was unsuccessful in getting Walton’s interrogation thrown out, other allegations of impropriety by detectives had not been fully litigated by the time the plea deal was reached, court records show.
During the interrogation, Walton said one of the males with her had shot Rosas-Rosales, a statement that lined up with Alvarado’s description of a male killing his friend. But she also said that multiple shots were fired and admitted to telling her mom she had accidentally shot Rosas-Rosales, though after more waffling she denied ever shooting him, according to court records.
At Walton’s preliminary hearing, Alvarado took the stand first and described how Rosas-Rosales expected the night to go.
“He told me because he had done this before … he wanted me to choke her,” Alvarado said, later clarifying that “her” referred to whichever “prostitute” had the misfortune of crossing their path. When asked what Rosas-Rosales’ killer looked like, Alvarado said he didn’t know, though he’d earlier told police it was a man, records show.
Garcia testified about the interrogation, stating that despite the circumstances, Walton was “extremely” calm to the point that he found it unnerving.
“Walton was a young lady, college educated,” Garcia said. “It was all nonchalant the way she went about describing the large amount of robberies with no concern or regard for her safety or anybody else.”
Walton is scheduled to be sentenced in January, records show.