Christian Jimenez, a 21-year-old Hispanic/Latino male, was shot on the morning of May 20, 2023, outside an apartment complex on the 800 block of Garner Avenue in Salinas. He and a 20-year-old friend had been working on Jimenez’s new car when two men approached and opened fire; Jimenez suffered multiple gunshot wounds and later died at a local trauma center, while his friend was also struck and survived.
A stray round hit a nearby resident, a mother who was cooking breakfast in her apartment, leaving her paralyzed.
In the days after the shooting, Salinas police identified two suspects: Abel Juan Perez and Ivan Jovani Barriga. Perez was arrested after a warrant service in Gonzales; Barriga was later taken into custody as well. Investigators alleged the pair had driven past the Garner Avenue apartment multiple times that morning before parking around the corner and ambushing the victims, despite neither victim having gang ties.
Both men—identified as members of the Salinas Acosta Plaza subset of the Norteño gang—were charged with murder, attempted murder, and related offenses. A Monterey County jury found them guilty in January 2025, including special-circumstance findings that the murder was carried out by lying in wait and for the benefit of a criminal street gang. The charges also included assault with a semiautomatic firearm and assault with a machine gun based on evidence presented at trial.
On February 20, 2025, Judge Rafael Vázquez sentenced Perez and Barriga to life without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors and local news outlets noted that the same gunfire that killed Jimenez also paralyzed the bystander mother, underscoring the indiscriminate violence of the attack.
