California serial killer appears to be ‘on a mission’, as police link seven shootings - The Guardian US

Ballistics tests tie together fatal shooting in Oakland with killings of five men and the non-fatal shooting of a woman in Stockton.

Ballistics tests and some video evidence linked the shootings in Stockton and Oakland, about 70 miles apart in northern California, police said.

What we do believe is that it’s mission-oriented,” Stockton police chief Stanley McFadden said on Tuesday.

Late on Monday, police said two additional cases last year, a man’s death in Oakland and the non-fatal shooting of a woman in Stockton, had been tied to those killings.

They appear on video at several of the crime scenes but no evidence links them directly to the shootings, McFadden said.

The shooting death of a man in Oakland around 4.15am on 10 April 2021, has also been connected to the violence in Stockton, police said.

Police said four of the Stockton homicide victims were walking alone and a fifth was in a parked car when they were killed in the evening or early morning in the city of 320,000 residents, about 50 miles (80km) south of the state capital, Sacramento