A suspect in a 2018 East Palo Alto double homicide was arrested in Mexico and extradited to the United States, nearly eight years after two young men were killed at a Halloween party.
The shooting happened around 3 a.m. on October 14, 2018, outside A-1 Auto Service & Towing on Pulgas Avenue, where a pre-Halloween birthday party had drawn a crowd. Four people were shot. Two of them didn’t survive: Eduardo “Lalo” Alvarado Sandoval, 22, and Mario Andres Vidales Mendez, 23. Authorities identified Julian Rico Santana as a suspect at the time, but he had already fled to Mexico. He stayed gone for close to eight years.
US Marshals helped bring him back.
Santana, who is believed to be either 25 or 26 years old, was taken into custody in Mexico and extradited to the United States. He’s now being held in Redwood City on charges of murder and attempted murder. A court appearance in San Mateo County was initially scheduled for Monday but got pushed to Tuesday, according to SFist. If Santana is 25 now, he may have been as young as 17 at the time of the shooting, though his exact age then isn’t confirmed.
The families of Alvarado Sandoval and Vidales Mendez spent those eight years pushing for answers. Veronica Sandoval, the mother of Eduardo Alvarado Sandoval, released a statement after the arrest. “My son went to a party and never came home,” she said. “For eight years, we have lived with unimaginable pain, waiting and praying for this day.” She said she plans to be in court to face her son’s suspected killer, “for our son, for our family, and for the justice he deserves.”
That’s a long time to wait.
That’s a long time to carry something like that.
The Palo Alto-based organization Mothers Against Murder put up a $20,000 reward in late 2020 to try to draw attention to the stalled case. It worked, eventually. Margaret Petros, executive director of Mothers Against Murder, told Palo Alto Online that the arrest is “long overdue.”
East Palo Alto has one of the more complicated public safety histories in San Mateo County. The city sits at a sharp economic border, wedged between Menlo Park and Palo Alto, two of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. The East Palo Alto Police Department handles calls in a dense community that has historically seen under-investment in crime prevention resources. Unsolved homicides from that era, the late 2010s, weren’t rare. Cases went cold. Families waited.
This case had something working in its favor: it didn’t go cold, exactly. Investigators named a suspect early. The problem was geography, a border, and eight years of distance.
Extraditions between the US and Mexico have grown more procedurally complex over the past decade, and the US Marshals Service runs dedicated fugitive operations units specifically built to pursue suspects who cross into other countries. The involvement of the Marshals in this case signals that someone kept pushing, that the case stayed active on a federal level even when local momentum might have flagged.
For the families, none of that procedural history changes what they lost on a street in East Palo Alto before sunrise on a Saturday in October 2018. Two young men in their early twenties showed up to a birthday party and were shot before they could go home. The people who loved them have spent nearly a decade doing the work of keeping those names from disappearing, talking to reporters, taking calls from investigators, showing up.
Veronica Sandoval said she’ll be in that San Mateo County courtroom. She’s been waiting eight years to get there.