OAKLAND — A local stablehand agreed to serve nine years in prison for fatally shooting a man during a confrontation, court records show.
Victor Aguilar, 61, was sentenced to nine years in prison and transferred on June 2 to North Kern State Prison, where he remains, records show. Originally charged with murder, he pleaded no contest to manslaughter in a deal with Alameda County prosecutors.
Aguilar and the victim, 28-year-old Hector Martinez, lived in adjacent curbside trailers near where Kerwin Avenue meets Knight Street in East Oakland’s Brookfield Village. On Oct. 11, 2023, the two argued over allegations of infidelity between Martinez and a woman who lived in a nearby mobile home. Martinez allegedly slapped Aguilar during the argument, and later lifted his shirt and dared Aguilar to shoot him, police said at the time.
David Briggs, a local defense attorney who represented Aguilar, said that his client’s life story amounted to one personal tragedy after another. At age 6, Aguilar witnessed the murders of his dad and two brothers by a gang looking to take over a family ranch in Mexico. At age 9, he was kicked in the head by a horse, likely causing permanent brain damage.
Aguilar is developmentally disabled and can’t speak English — despite spending 23 years in the United States — and his Spanish was so slurred that translators had a difficult time, Briggs said. Despite the childhood trauma, he maintained a lifelong love of horses and turned it into a stablehand job, but wasn’t able to afford anything more than a mobile home parked on an Oakland curb.
“If you wanna talk about a guy who got a bad hand, that’s Mr. Aguilar,” Briggs said, later adding that when it came to the plea deal, “I feel this was a just outcome.”
Aguilar confessed to killing Martinez when police came to arrest him, authorities said in court records. By then, several witnesses had identified Aguilar as the shooter, and they had his picture for a bizarre reason. Investigators had inadvertently snapped a picture of Aguilar while conducting surveillance on Enrique Campos-Patino, a suspect in an unrelated homicide that had occurred a day before Martinez was killed, in another part of town.
Campos-Patino has also resolved his charges. He pleaded no contest to manslaughter of 33-year-old Albert Servin-Ortega for a 21-year prison sentence. His co-defendant, Lester Villatoro, was released from jail after pleading no contest to accessory.