OAKLAND — A local resident has been sentenced to seven years in state prison for killing a man in a 2023 drive-by shooting, a homicide apparently motivated by a spontaneous argument and a thrown beer can.
Jose “Peche” Estrada-Avalos, 40, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of 21-year-old Santos Pablo-Ramirez. In exchange, prosecutors dropped a murder charge against him. He was sentenced to prison earlier this month, court records show.
The prosecution’s case against Estrada-Avalos was marred by inconsistent — or at one point, admittedly dishonest — testimony from the lone eyewitness, a woman who admitted she was driving when Estrada-Avalos and a group of people, including the victim, got into a shouting match that precipitated the shooting. The woman lied on the stand at Estrada-Avalos’ preliminary hearing, claimed to have memory problems at key moments of the timeline, set up a possible self-defense theory, and led Judge Thomas Reardon to surmise that she could have been implicating Estrada-Avalos to cover up her boyfriend’s possible involvement.
Still, Reardon held Estrada-Avalos to answer on the murder charge at Estrada-Avalos’ November 2024 preliminary hearing, citing the relatively low legal standards for that stage of a criminal case. He also noted that it appeared Estrada-Avalos was “juiced up” and looking for problems that night.
“(Estrada-Avalos) thinks it’s fun to harass individuals on sidewalks and yell at them and start fights with them,” Reardon added, referring to the night in question.
According to multiple eyewitnesses, Pablo-Ramirez was hanging out with a group of friends, drinking beer, on a street corner at the 2100 block of 39th Avenue in Oakland. At around 3 a.m. on June 17, Estrada-Avalos and a woman named Marleny Pena-Arias drove by in an allegedly stolen SUV. Pena-Arias would later testify, under a prosecution grant of immunity, that the group yelled at Estrada-Avalos and that he called them “drunks,” and that they passed by, turned the car around, and went back.
“They were insulting us,” Pena-Arias said on the stand at the preliminary hearing. She later added that “Peche pulled out his weapon and shot in the direction of the guys”
But Pena-Arias also testified that someone in the group threw a beer can at their car, and that the victim appeared to be going for a weapon in his waistband when he was shot. She also lied about her familiarity with guns, then admitted to having lied, stating, “that’s why I’m correcting myself now and I apologize.”
Pena-Arias is described in court records as a serial catalytic converter thief who has been linked to more than two dozen thefts around the Bay Area. She was also charged with firing shots at a theft victim during an incident one month before Pablo-Ramirez was killed, and when she was arrested at a hotel shortly after the shooting, she was with her boyfriend, not Estrada-Avalos, according to court records.
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But Estrada-Avalos was arrested with a short-barreled rifle in his vehicle two days after the homicide, according to court records.
At the preliminary hearing, Judge Reardon said Pena-Arias’ credibility was “not great,” adding that it set up two possible theories that benefited the defense: the possibility that it was actually her boyfriend who was the shooter, and a possible self-defense argument that Reardon said should be “resolved at trial.”
Deputy District Attorney Greg Dolge argued at the hearing that video footage of the shooting showed Pablo-Ramirez and his companions were “surprised” to see a gun and attempted to scatter to avoid being shot.
“(Pablo-Ramirez) takes off and he’s shot as he’s running away,” Dolge said.