OAKLAND — Two men were convicted in the shooting death of a Hayward resident at a liquor store, but one of the defendants may be breathing a sigh of relief.
Bryan Hernandez, 25, was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of 32-year-old Gustavo Tavera. But Hernandez’s co-defendant, 29-year-old Juan Vera, was acquitted of murder and manslaughter, and convicted instead of attempted voluntary manslaughter with a gun enhancement.
Both are set to be sentenced on June 18, but only Hernandez faces a life sentence.
The set of circumstances surrounding Tavera’s March 5, 2022 murder were horrifyingly bizarre, with jurors receiving a nuanced play-by-play at trial. Hernandez and Vera, who did not know one another, were together at a party in Hayward that night, and at one point Vera and a friend left to buy beer at N&M Liquors on the 200 block of A Street, which was walking distance away, court records show.
Tavera happened by there with another man, and got mad when the clerk refused to sell him beer. He loudly stated, “you don’t want to sell beer to me, but you want to sell to these two dumba—s,” referring to Vera and his friend, according to court records.
That’s when the conflict started, and it would end with Vera producing a gun and shooting Tavera multiple times, but not producing gunshot wounds that would have been fatal. While that was going on, Hernandez was walking toward the liquor store, court records show.
When Hernandez learned what had happened, he walked into the store, gun in hand and shot the helpless Tavera five times in the head. Tavera was on the ground, when Hernandez walked in, and never had a chance to defend himself, according to witness testimony and video from surveillance cameras depicting the whole thing.
Vera’s defense relied on the theory that, had it not been for Hernandez, Tavera would have survived the encounter, and that the prosecution’s contention that the two worked in tandem was flimsy. Hernandez’s lawyer, meanwhile, argued that Hernandez lacked the mental state necessary for a murder conviction.
In 2023, a judge agreed with Vera’s lawyer and refused to uphold the murder case against Vera, but prosecutors re-filed the case soon after, court records show.
Along the way, Vera’s attorney accused prosecutors of “improper prosecutorial interference with Mr. Vera’s attorney-client relationship” and attempting to strong arm the lawyer, Barney Berkowitz, into “informing” on his own client. The controversy stemmed from concerns that Vera had attempted to mail unredacted police reports describing potential witnesses to a third party, from Santa Rita Jail, court records show.