Tarrah Lynn Taylor was strangled and beaten by her ex-boyfriend last Sunday and again on Monday. The 24-year-old reported the attacks to San Jose police.
Shortly after midnight the next day, police said in court documents filed today that the 27-year-old ex-boyfriend, Joseph Vicencio, returned to the apartment and shot Taylor, her 24-year-old roommate, Jeanessa Lurie and Lurie’s boyfriend, Max Chavez Ryan, then fled into the night.
Max Ryan, one of three friends murdered Sept. 16, worked with homeless people for the San Jose Housing Department. Facebook post.
All three victims suffered multiple gunshot wounds. The gunshots and Taylor’s screams shattered the midnight calm of the South San Jose neighborhood near Martial Cottle Park.
When police arrived at about 12:15am, they found Lurie’s body inside the apartment, with a mortally wounded Ryan. Taylor lay outside, bleeding profusely and screaming. She was pronounced dead at Valley Medical Center less than an hour later. Ryan, a San Jose city homeless outreach worker, succumbed to his wounds around 3am.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen presented the charges against Vicencio at his arraignment this afternoon in Santa Clara County Superior Court: three counts of murder and three related felony weapons crimes. The suspect remains in the Santa Clara County Main Jail, without bail. He is to return to court Oct. 24.
Vicencio appeared in court today in multi-layered articles of clothing represented by deputy public defender William Weigel.
Rosen said in an interview that police had been on the lookout for Vicencio after Taylor’s domestic violence report, but he could not account for how the suspect was able to evade police and return to kill.
“He committed an act of domestic violence and fled the scene,” Rosen told San Jose Inside. “And then the police department was looking for him, and they couldn't find him. And then he came back and he committed this horrible murder.”
After the shooting, “the police department worked 24 hours, every single second of that and found him and arrested him — and he's never getting out,” the district attorney said.
The weekend attacks on Taylor weren’t the only time Vicencio had appeared on the radar of San Jose detectives.
“We have been very concerned about this defendant, Vicencio, for several years,” said Rosen.
The district attorney’s frustration with one particular incident during his tenure as the county’s top prosecutor – when Vicencio was convicted in 2020 of 11 felony counts, based on a September 2019 incident in which he emptied an automatic pistol into the front window of the Martin Luther King Jr. library and never served time in prison – figured in today’s arraignment.
“We charged him with 11 felony counts and asked for him to be sent to prison for nine years. We recognized that he was a dangerous person,” Rosen told reporters today. “The judge granted probation in that case over our extremely strong objection.”
Rosen listed the details of those 2019 felonies in the charging document filed at today’s hearing, to establish “probable cause for the pretrial restraint of [the] defendant.”
The judge in 2020 placed Vicencio in mandatory confinement for mental health treatment, under the supervision of Santa Clara County's Mental Health Treatment Court. He was later able to get the conviction completely expunged from his record.
Though his record was expunged, Vicencio was still legally prohibited from owning a firearm. Investigators reported they are still working to determine the origin of the suspected weapon, which police have declined to identify.
One of the two witnesses told San Jose police investigators that Vicencio feared getting in trouble after the victim.
“(He) couldn’t have any ‘loose ends’ and people talking about him,” police investigators wrote in the charging document filed today. “(A witness) heard about the murders near where Vicencio lived and confronted Vicencio about it. Vicencio told (the witness) that there was an issue with a male at the apartment but he handled it.”
San Jose police investigators said video footage from the area collected after Tuesday’s shooting show Vicencio walking toward the residence just before the shooting and fleeing immediately afterwards.
“He was wearing distinctive clothing which we recovered, a satchel bag which we recovered, and a weapon, a gun. Two witnesses we spoke with also indicated that he made admissions about what he did,” Rosen said.
“Gun violence is a huge scourge in our community and our state and in our country. Just a few days ago, we put out a public service announcement about gun violence restraining orders, red flag laws,” Rosen told reporters Friday. “We use these restraining orders more than any other county in the Bay Area, by far, and they save lives. We did not have an opportunity to get such a gun violence restraining order in this case.”
