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Sacramento County prosecutors said they would retry Dandrae Martin and Mtula Payton on homicide charges stemming from the deadly 2022 K Street mass shooting that killed six people and wounded 12 others. A jury failed to reach verdicts in July.
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The District Attorney’s Office did not issue a formal statement but a spokesperson for the DA’s Office confirmed the decision to The Sacramento Bee.
The case was scheduled to return to Sacramento Superior Court for a hearing on Jan. 7, the spokesperson said.
The decision means prosecutors will again seek to hold Martin and Payton criminally responsible for the deaths of three women caught in the gunfire that erupted shortly after 2 a.m. April 3, 2022, at 10th and K streets in downtown Sacramento.
Yamile Martinez, 21; Johntaya Alexander, 21; and Melinda Davis, 57, were killed in the barrage. Three other people — Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchessi, 32; and Davazia Turner, 29 — were also killed. Prosecutors alleged the three men were involved in the shootout.
Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman declared a mistrial July 21 after jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked on the remaining homicide charges against Martin and Payton.
Days before the mistrial, prosecutors dismissed first-degree murder charges against the two men after jurors deadlocked a first time. Jurors continued deliberating on whether Martin and Payton were guilty of second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of Martinez, Alexander and Davis, or if the men acted in self-defense.
They could not reach unanimous verdicts.
Jurors did convict Martin and Payton of being felons in possession of firearms and found allegations of prior felony convictions to be true.
The trial centered on sharply different accounts of what caused the gunfight in what became the deadliest mass shooting in Sacramento history.
Prosecutors argued Martin and Payton were armed gang members who participated in a confrontation with rivals that erupted into gunfire on a crowded downtown street as nightclubs closed.
“They’re not motivated by fear; they’re motivated by animus,” Deputy District Attorney Brad Ng told jurors during closing arguments. “They escalated the terror on K Street and now, they’re looking for an excuse. They escalated at every opportunity. These are gang members who were arming themselves. These two men are guilty of murder.”
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Defense attorneys argued Martin and Payton were caught in a sudden burst of gunfire and fired their weapons in self-defense.
Attorneys for the men argued Harris fired the first shots, killing Turner and setting off the gun battle. Investigators did not link the shots Payton fired while fleeing north on 10th Street to the deaths of the three women.
Investigators recovered 114 spent shell casings along the K Street Mall after the shooting, according to court records, evidence of the sheer volume of gunfire unleashed within seconds.
Both defendants testified during the trial.
“Everybody was running in the same direction as me. People were getting shot around me. I was scared,” Payton testified in June.
“Of what?” his attorney, Reed Kingsbury, asked.
“Dying,” Payton replied.
The mistrial left relatives of those killed facing the possibility of another trial more than four years after the shooting.
John Alexander, Johntaya Alexander’s father, said outside the courthouse after the mistrial that his family had been denied justice.
“I did not get justice today,” Alexander said. “I did not get justice in these four years. I did not get justice in these two months of being in the courtroom. I got a slap in the face.”
It was not clear what charges the men would face early next year.
The case had already undergone a significant change in defendants.
Smiley Martin, Dandrae Martin’s brother, was wounded in the K Street gunfire and later arrested in connection with the shooting. He died in June 2024 in the Sacramento County Main Jail while awaiting trial. The charges against him were later dismissed.
The first trial of Payton and Dandrae Martin lasted weeks and included extensive testimony from police investigators, gang experts and the defendants themselves. Jurors repeatedly reviewed surveillance video capturing the hours, minutes and seconds leading to the shooting before ultimately deadlocking on the homicide charges.
Prosecutors also struggled to secure testimony in earlier hearings from witnesses of the shooting. One wounded witness was jailed after failing to appear in court, while another initially invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before a judge granted him immunity and ordered him to testify.
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