Orange Cove double murder case ends with life without parole sentence

Jairo Mancilla was sentenced Wednesday, July 9, to life without the possibility of parole in Fresno County Superior Court for the 2017 killings of Javier Lizaola Jr. and Alexander Esquibel in Orange Cove. The sentence ended a case that stretched more than nine years from the day the two men were shot near Railroad Avenue. For the victims’ families, it finally brought a legal ending to a loss that began on a public trail beside a park bench in a small city southeast of Fresno.

Prosecutors said Lizaola, 24, and Esquibel, 27, were walking near the trail on March 10, 2017, when they encountered Mancilla sitting on a bench. A verbal exchange followed, and Mancilla then shot both men with a handgun, the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office said. Eyewitnesses identified him as the shooter, and he was arrested April 21, 2017. Two juveniles later found the bodies and told their parents, who called police, underscoring how quickly the violence spilled into the daily life of the neighborhood.

The case did not move straight to final judgment. Mancilla’s original conviction was overturned on appeal, and the matter went back to trial before the retrial concluded June 10. The California Court of Appeal filed its opinion in People v. Mancilla on December 29, 2023, under docket F082925, addressing issues that included imperfect self-defense and changes to gang-law requirements under Assembly Bill 333. The earlier jury had found Mancilla guilty of two first-degree murders and found true a multiple-murder special circumstance, firearm allegations and a gang enhancement.

The killings struck Orange Cove, a city of 9,649 residents in the 2020 census about 35 miles southeast of Fresno, in a place where a trail and park bench are part of the everyday landscape. That ordinary setting became the scene of a double homicide that kept returning to court for years, even after the arrests and the first verdict. The final life-without-parole sentence closes the case in formal terms, but the delay has left families carrying the loss far longer than the day of the shooting itself.

Family members had asked the court for the harshest punishment, saying no other family should have to endure the same tragedy. With the sentence now imposed, the case that began on a March morning in 2017 has finally reached its last chapter.