OAKLAND — A woman has accepted a six-year prison term and a manslaughter conviction as part of a plea deal to make her murder charge go away, court records show.
Maricela Urias-Martinez, 22, pleaded no contest to killing her 25-year-old ex-boyfriend, Walter Mancia Menjiva, in a Sept. 27, 2023 drive-by shooting in Oakland. She was sentenced on Jan. 13 to six years in prison, but remains at Santa Rita Jail for now, records show.
Urias-Martinez was the only suspect to be charged in Mancia Menjiva’s death, but was not the only participant. Authorities say another man drove a stolen Infiniti to the 5700 block of International Boulevard, where a person in the passenger seat — later identified by police as Urias-Martinez — shot and killed Mancia Menjiva.
The Infiniti was later torched. The man suspected of driving it, and of later setting it ablaze, pleaded no contest to possessing a stolen car in a separate case and was sentenced to six months in jail, records show.
Police never revealed the suspected motive for the shooting. They say Urias-Martinez denied participating in the homicide and that the suspected driver refused to talk. The identification of both parties was aided by security cameras that captured the shooting.
Urias-Martinez was pregnant when he was arrested in November 2023. A court motion filed last May said her due date was in June and argued she should be released before giving birth, or at least given a doula in jail. A judge denied the bid to free her, court records show.
After Urias-Martinez was arrested, the gun allegedly used to kill Mancia Menjiva was recovered from a suspect in another homicide. Lab tests confirmed it had been used to kill two people in two separate shootings, court records show.
The man the gun was recovered from, Marco Leiva-Saucedo, is in jail facing charges that he murdered 25-year-old Johnathan Carballo in a shooting that also injured 30-year-old man. Leiva-Saucedo was initially just charged with gun possession, but days later prosecutors charged him with murder.
Carballo was shot and killed in the 2300 block of International Boulevard on Aug. 28, 2023, about a month before Mancia Menjiva was killed. Authorities say Leiva-Saucedo later identified himself on security surveillance of the shooting, during a police interview.