Marcus Cardenas had just stepped outside his house for a smoke and a phone call when an SUV pulled up. A man jumped out and shot him in the neck and head.
Cardenas’s mother, Dolores, ran outside. “I went to him immediately,” she said. But she was too late. Her 20-year-old son was lying flat on the ground.
That moment – more than eight years ago now – spun into a vortex of pursuit and persecution. Dolores wanted to find out who had shot her son, and why.
She began chasing leads. Together with her son’s best friend, she drove all over town, questioning everyone Marcus knew, tracking down possible suspects online and on social media.
But the more they hunted for answers, the more she and her family were themselves hunted, Dolores said. She was followed from safe house to safe house by assailants with guns, she said, until she couldn’t tell who was chasing who. She knew her son had a complicated past and had been involved with a local street gang – but she didn’t understand what had triggered the wrath against him, or her family.
In retrospect, Dolores thinks, maybe she should have left the detective work to the police. “But I didn’t care at the time. I was angry,” she said. “And the Delano PD wasn’t doing anything.”
Here in Delano, California – an agricultural community in California’s central valley reputed for its abundant fields of table grapes – a rash of gun violence has left dozens of families reeling and desperate for answers.
Since 2020, the town has seen 53 shootings and 16 gun homicides – many of which the city’s police department has classified as “gang-related”. But few families have received answers as to who were behind the killings of their loved ones.
“The police just don’t seem to care,” said Dolores. “If the police think a shooting is gang-related, they have this attitude like: ‘Let them all kill each other, it’s less work for us.’”
Delano’s police chief, Jerry Nicholson, said he and his officers treated each homicide case with equal care. “We don’t care who the victim is,” he said. “We work the case exactly the same as everybody else.”
Still, he said, “I understand the frustration of the families. But I know, and being realistic, that not every case can be solved. It’s not a lack of us trying.”
The Delano police department homicide case clearance rate – its share of reported crimes that lead to an arrest and are sent to a prosecutor – was 33% between 2020 and 2024, and 40% between 2015 and 2018, lower than the national average of 50%. Across the US, clearance rates have been declining in recent years, from more than 60% in 1990 to about 50% in 2020. Research and reports have found that the homicides of Black and Latino victims are the least likely to be solved.
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Marcus had been involved with street gangs, Dolores said. But he was trying to figure himself out. He had started working in the fields and was looking to get his general education diploma. “He didn’t deserve what happened to him. No one does,” she said.
In the weeks after Marcus’s death, Dolores became desperate, she said. At one point, she spotted the man she was convinced had killed her son and confronted him.
But she felt police weren’t interested in digging deeper. “I kept calling and calling and leaving messages. It was useless,” she said.
No one with the power to help them, or Marcus, seemed to be helping, said Crystal Medrano, Marcus’s best friend. The day he died, she remembered, it took the ambulance a long time to come. When it finally arrived, a couple of the paramedics were laughing as they worked, she said. “I feel like the hospital doesn’t care, either,” Medrano said, shaking her head in anger. “I feel like they have a deal with the morgue.”
Cardenas and Medrano weren’t the only ones who had come to feel that way.
“It feels like no one cares. Once someone’s gone it’s like, ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’” said Lisa Cantu, 54, who lost her son Juan Luis in May last year, at a recent meeting for the families of homicide victims at the World Harvest International church in Delano.
“I know 100% they have my son getting shot on camera. And they’re not looking through the tape.”
In 2020, Delano approved the installation of 20 surveillance cameras in “high crime” areas with the intent of deterring and catching violent criminals. And last year, the city installed a number of licence-plate readers in order to address auto theft. “What’s the point of all that?” Cantu said. “What’s the point if they don’t catch anybody?”
The police chief said he understood that families were upset, but that he and his deputies treated each case with care.
“I don’t get mad that families are frustrated with us,” Nicholson said. “I would feel the same way if something happened to my family and the police didn’t solve the case.”
He declined to comment on the investigation into the killing of Juan Luis, which is still active. But he noted that the cameras did not catch everything, and that perpetrators often wore masks or drove stolen cars to conceal their identities.
He said that Marcus’s case was especially difficult to crack because Dolores was one of the only witnesses, and that her interference had compromised the police investigation. “That specific case was troubled from the beginning because of information that was learned from her,” he said. “She gave us information that panned out to be untrue.”
He said Dolores’ credibility was compromised by her family’s association with gangs. “It’s the lifestyle that these people live,” he said. “She has allowed other family members to live the lifestyle, and has supported other family members in the gang lifestyle. And so, you know, the criticism that comes from her, I take with a grain of salt.”
Dolores said she passed on the information she found from her research to police, and she emphasized that even people with a complicated past deserve justice.
A big issue, Nicholson said, was the level of fear in the community that cooperating with law enforcement will attract retaliatory violence. “They know if you talk, you’re going to get hurt or you’re going to get killed. And they may have valuable information that may solve a lot of our crimes, but they don’t tell us.”
In a town built by Latino and Filipino immigrant families, some might also fear that going to the police will draw unwanted scrutiny on loved ones who are undocumented, added Delano’s mayor, Joe Alindajao. “That’s certainly not true. But people are still intimidated.”
Alindajao, who also serves as the deputy district attorney for Kern county, said that the new cameras and licence readers were just one part of the city’s plan to solve crime and reduce violence. And, he said, they had done their job, aiding in the investigations of several cases last year.
“I try to be sensitive to victims of crime, but I think sometimes we oversimplify the process and what it really takes to solve a violent or serious crime, especially gang crime,” he said. “And that’s not an excuse, because we try our best.”
The department now requires officers to regularly check in with residents for feedback and hosts community events to build trust, according to Nicholson.
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A 2021 report by the violence prevention non-profit Hope and Heal Fund found that while Delano’s residents overall supported police and policing, many also reported experiences of profiling and other negative experiences that can erode trust in the department.
“What we’re really seeing is the failure of a system,” said Cuco Rodriguez, the chief strategist at Hope and Heal Fund. “The way law enforcement functions hasn’t changed in decades. They’re shitty problem solvers.”
For example, Rodriguez said, the department could dedicate more resources to find out where the perpetrators of gun violence are procuring their weapons. Doing so might be difficult and involve a lot of old-fashioned detective work, as well as coordination with federal gun databases – but it could pay off, he argued. “If you could figure out how people are trafficking guns into the community, you could eliminate the source,” he said. “That sounds like a practical thing to do.”
The police in Delano have said many of the guns involved in shootings in Delano are never recovered. Others are homemade weapons that are untraceable, and many are stolen. Nicholson said that in his experience, even gang members who have agreed to cooperate are hesitant to reveal the source of their weapons.
The third time Cardenas was targeted – she doesn’t know by whom – she and her children were staying at a rental owned by one of her friends. One evening, when everyone was in bed, someone shot 22 rounds at the windows. “That’s when I decided: we have to leave,” she said. “Nothing ever gets done in Delano. No one ever gets caught.”
Back at the church, as families shared their stories of loss, David Vivas, the pastor, sat in the back of the room. He was the only one who wasn’t chiming in.
Over the years, he had held grieving parents whose children had been shot dead. He had counselled congregants who feared for their lives, and young people who had become involved in gangs and were unsure how to escape a cycle of violence. He was one of the first at the scene after Marcus Cardenas was shot – and he and his son Adam Rene Guillen had helped organise a march to honour Cardenas and other victims of gun violence.
And then, in January 2020, Guillen was shot in a drive-by, while he was visiting a friend’s memorial site. He was 21.
When a detective arrived at Vivas’s door at about 4am, the pastor couldn’t fathom what might have happened. “The only thing I thought was, ‘Oh, my goodness, Adam got in trouble.’ That’s the worst case,” he said. When he found out Adam had been killed, he went into a shock. “I couldn’t believe it. This was how my nightmare began.”
Now, like so many other parents, he was waiting for answers and justice. But Vivas said that for his own mental health – and for the sake of his congregants, who rely on him – he has had to learn to accept that the process is out of his hands.
“I understand that detectives are working not just on Adam’s case, but many other cases, not just these types of crimes, but other crimes. And I understand that we don’t have a huge police department,” he said. “But I can certainly understand and relate to some of these families. Because they feel forgotten.”
